If you read the comments on these blogs you’ll see that Warren warned me about Japanese toilets. For reasons I won’t go in to here, Warren knows everything there is to know about toilets. I don’t, but this is what I know about Japanese ones. Public toilets are ceramic slits in the floor, which you stand over. Women wearing pants have a distinct disadvantage in this process, and I have been grateful for my basketball muscles many times. Hotel toilets, on the other hand, have electrically warmed seats, which is weird because I keep thinking someone just got up from them, and little buttons that activate the bidet and the other stream that washes your butt for you. You can change the water pressure, the temperature, and the length of time the thing sprays you. This is true is cheapo hotels as well as high-class ones.

Showers are familiar hand-held devices, except that the bathrooms have drains in the floor, and in apartments like Seiichiro’s you’re expected to take your shower in the inside room of the divided bathroom, which holds the bathtub but not the toilet and sink. You stand on the floor and spray the whole place; you don’t use the bathtub unless you’re taking a bath.

And then there’s the public bath. I stayed at two ryokans, Japanese-type in s: a fancy one and a cheap one. They both worked the same. You change into your robe and slippers, provided by the hotel, in your room, and wander down the hall and/or the elevator to the public bath (separate ones for men and women). You leave your slippers just inside the outer door, and your robe and glasses and room key in a basket on a shelf. Then you go into the first room, where there are sets of faucets and little stools at each one. You sit down and wash (these places also have hand-held showers). When you’re completely clean, you go into the next room, the public bath itself. The ones I was in were well used, the water very hot, and it seemed to be the etiquette not to make eye contact except with someone you’d come in with. There was no conversation, but it may be different, say, in the morning, when no one’s tired yet. They’re great places to unwind, these public baths, like the whirlpool at the gym. (My gym, secretly known as Testosterone Plaza, a bodybuilder place where for some reason they're very nice to people like me, doesn’t have one.) When you’re all nice and relaxed, you leave, dry off in the outer room, and then stand there like an idiot wondering which the hell pair of slippers is yours. In restaurants and tea houses where you have to take your shoes off you don’t have this problem, because of course you recognize your own shoes even if you didn’t think to note exactly where you put them. But at the ryokans all the slippers are the same. The first timers always have this problem, and everyone is very polite and they don’t laugh at you. But they will stop you, very politely, from sticking your feet in their slippers. The real problem comes when other people are still in the bath and you’re there alone confronting all those slippers. Then you just take your best guess and rush away.

In the ryokans, by the way, it’s perfectly acceptable to stroll the halls, sit in the lobby, and come to breakfast in your robe. It’s pretty funny, so many people, adults and kids both, hanging around the hotel lobby in identical robes and slippers.