I am not piss-shy.
Honest.
Some guys are, but not me. What I mean by this is that a few guys get all choked up at the urinal. It can be a disconcerting experience standing at a urinal, shoulder to shoulder with a pair of perfect strangers, a crowd of men standing behind you… staring… waiting…. staring…
Well, anyway it never bothered me. It wasn’t something I enjoyed, but it never “stopped the means of production” if you get my drift.
Well, ok. I thought I was not piss-shy until I came to Japan.
You see, when I first came to Japan I started working in elementary schools. Unlike my elementary school of long ago, there are no “teachers bathrooms.” In the schools I worked at, the bathrooms were shared by students and teachers. The bathroom itself is barely divided between boys and girls. I mean, when the school was built, unisex public baths were still common, so why bother to build separate boys and girls sections, right? So on one side of the room is a row of urinals, with a squat toilet at the end. On the other side of the room is a series of stalls for the girls. Since they were built, most but not all of the schools added some sort of divider between the two sides. Of course, unlike American toilets the doors on Japanese stalls go all the way to the floor. (When you are using a squat toilet, those eight inches make all the difference.) There is also no door- the girls have their stalls but the boys side is open for anyone who cares to look, and opposite the entrance, on the far side of the room, a large window is kept open for ventilation.
Mostly, it was no problem, but I found myself avoiding one particular bathroom at one particular school. It was located right next to the office, so teachers and office ladies constantly passed by, who of course, did what everyone does when they pass by a window or open door, and peek in. The window in the bathroom opened onto a small street that had a fair bit of foot traffic. The window in the hallway opposite of the bathroom overlooked the playground. The divider between sections was just a piece of canvas.
So I admit it, when there were a pack of giggling eight year old girls two feet away from me, I got a little trigger-shy.
Eventually, there came a time, however, when its use became unavoidable.
Of course, this was the exact same time that four female teachers began talking right in-front of the urinal half of the bathroom, while children ran by screaming and laughing. But the tank was full and the baby was on the way so what could I do? I angled away as best I could, looked out the window and relaxed, and started to take care of the business.
At which point a woman in her late eighties came tottering by on the street outside. She paused outside of the window, leaning heavily on her walker for rest. Shakily, she turned her head and peered in the window at me. Now given her age, and the fact that public urination is quite legal in Japan, I am sure she wasn’t seeing anything she had not seen before. However, it was quite likely her first time watching a gai-jin, a foreigner changing the oil. But at this time, the flood-gates had been loosed, and I stood there, watching her watching me. If I turned away, I would be exposing myself to my co-workers, and every guy knows that you just cant stop up the waterworks. So she stood there watching for the next fifteen seconds or so, and when I was done I put myself back together, and gave her a little wave, and went about my day.
Repatriate 