My first Japanese apartment's shower confounded me. Behind a small smoked-glass door down the hallway from the tiny separate toilet room was a small room with a plastic floor and a bathtub. There was no curtain rod, and I couldn't imagine why some idiot had installed the showerhead on a wall in the middle of the room instead of properly above the bathtub where everyone knows it's supposed to go. Every morning I would irritably stand in my curtainless tub and aim the showerhead to shoot water halfway across the room into the bathtub, wondering just how difficult it would be to remove the showerhead and install it correctly.

Maybe a month later, I was venting to a friend about this ill design. He laughed at me for maybe five full minutes after I finished my little rant, and after catching his breath, asked to come over to my apartment and show me something. I consented, more than confused. He opened the door to my shower room and pointed at the plastic floor. "See that little trapdoor at the base of the outside of the tub? It's a drain. This whole room is the shower, and you're supposed to stand outside the tub and shower here before you get in the tub. Get it?" I got it, although I'd never expected to have to get directions for a bathtub. Coolest shower ever though, and I never had to scrub the bathtub. What a great country. If only it came with an instruction booklet.

Comments

[Karla]

Yeah, my shower is pretty short too. Now that I've figured out where to stand in relation to the showerhead, I have to contort into sort of a limbo-position to get my head underneath the spray.

A Japanese shower though, I think is sort of a side note anyway, when the bathtubs here are so very delicious!

[Bondi Books]

Nice one. haha. Thanks for that story. It made me smile. But what you thought in the beginning makes total sense if you ask me. Bathrooms here are definitely a bit on thhe strange side and so small. My head just about hits the ceiling of mine!!