Flush your cares away

A bit of novelty news (rendered into English it becomes so, anyway); a peculiarly Japanese solution to a peculiarly Japanese problem.

Matsuyama, in Kyushu (map), suffers from chronic water shortages, and the city has chosen to make some inroads into the problem from an oblique angle: it is fitting every girls' toilet in its junior high schools with an attachment that simulates the sound of running water. Women (and men, to a lesser extent) in Japan tend to be self-conscious about any embarrassing noises they may make on the privy, and the solution until recently was to flush repeatedly while evacuating to cover them up. However, Japan's ever-inventive technotoilet makers have now come up with devices that provide the sound without the flush; Matsuyama is hoping that fitting these will persuade the 7700 children and 300 teachers who use its 1100 junior-high-school toilets to pull the chain once instead of the average 2.5 times. With luck, the results will be worth the JPY30 mn (around US$250,000) the city is spending.

Japanese article: ZAKZAK