Forrest Brown

We’re still at sea heading for South Georgia Island, so I thought I would show what the cabins are like. The Polar Pioneer has several different types of cabins, I’m staying in a Twin Public. So, the room has two beds (I’m sharing with Phil, one of the other Americans), a desk, storage, and a sink, but no toilet or shower. It’s not the Hyatt, but it’s clean, fairly comfortable and does the job.

There’s six toilets and three showers along the hallway outside our room, which is plenty, there’s never really any waiting to take a shower.

Japan has some pretty fancy toilets with things like heated seats and water jets to clean your bottom, but this might be the most useful thing added to toilets since the invention of the toilet. It’s a little light at the bottom of the toilet bowl that turns on when you lift the seat. Great for that midnight bathroom break.

Can you spot what’s missing in these Japanese public bathrooms?

One fairly annoying thing about Japan is that in many public bathrooms there is no way to dry your hands after you wash them. Some bathrooms have the blower style of hand dryer, but many have nothing, no dryer, no paper towels, nothing.

For some reason many public bathrooms for men in Japan have been designed so that there’s not much privacy.

While in Osaka earlier this year, I came across this semi-outdoor bathroom near the Osaka Castle. From the front the bathroom building looked normal, but once inside you saw that there was no back wall to the bathroom.

The perfect bathroom for people who worry that they might not have enough toilet paper to take care of business.

For some strange reason many of the bathrooms in the train stations have stairs going into them. I’ve been trying to figure out a reason for this, but so far I haven’t been able to to come up with a good one. Maybe they don’t like handicapped people?

I was on the 12th floor of the Daimaru Department Store next to Tokyo Station when I needed to use the bathroom. I found this cool bathroom with a view.

If you have Acrophobia and Parauresis you are in big trouble.