Shit

Let’s talk toilets. I don’t suppose you’ve ever had a real frozen butt unless you’ve spent time on the toilet of an old Japanese house in mid winter. That wasn’t as much of a problem with the traditional Japanese toilet since you squatted over it with your ass never touching the fixture, but the first moment of contact can be a bit painful on something like our present toilet seat in Akiya (above). Those very nice windows I love have no fastener, so there are huge gaps where the sliding pieces meet. And, if you look closely, you can see the opening at floor level behind the toilet, which also is made up of a sliding glass window, but it is basically a funnel for wind to blow up the back of anyone sitting on the throne.

If you haven’t read Junichiro Tanizaki’s amazing work on the Japanese aesthetic, In Praise of Shadows, I beg you to abandon reading this simpleton’s blog in order to go out to find a copy, which you must read immediately. You will thank me for it. Not only does it describe with great passion and complexity things like tatami, Japanese food, pottery, and most of all, the importance of the opposite of light, but it has a wonderful section on the Japanese toilet—including a mention of that low window behind the bowl—that is a mind-boggling work of critical acumen and great humor.

From next winter, however, our derrieres will stay toasty, and the winds will never flutter our shirt tails as we concentrate on the task at hand. We’ll not only have double-paned windows and insulated walls, but we’ve ordered the tankless toilet model made by Inax . . . wait for the drum roll . . . the Satis Eco-6. Eco-6 refers to the goal their engineers have reached after years of research in cutting water usage. Successive models have cut the average 13 liters of water used for each flush a few years ago down to 6 (5 if you use the “small” urine only flush). That’s enough to fill a bathtub with your savings every two days, or a financial saving of 12,000 yen a year. Equally satisfying is that now we have a Satis Eco-6 toilet to go with our Intrepid II wood stove. I'm looking forward to strutting around the house saying things like, "Hmmm, a bit cool isn't it? Time to break out the Intrepid, don't you think?" or "You look a bit full. Would you like to have a go with our Eco-6?"

But I’ll never ever again be able to say, after someone who has read In Praise of Shadows inevitably brings up the section on Japanese toilets, that I have that little window at the floor level in my own toilet room, and watch their eyes bulge in wonder and disbelief. Shit.

A Glimpse of Fire

We got our first estimate for the wood stove, including the six-meter high exterior chimney and installation. It came in about 120,000 yen less than we expected, which is a thrill when everything else seems to be going up every time you turn around. It’s a very small stove—even with the warming shelves on either side it’s only 810 centimeters across. But it should easily do the job of heating the house except, very likely, M’s salon at the opposite side of the house down the hall. We don’t expect to be using the stove much on sunny days, even on the coldest days of winter, considering the huge windows. I heard from a friend nearby that they use theirs for a few hours in the morning, then let it go cold until the sun goes down.

The stove’s a Vermont Castings Intrepid II, which features a catalytic combustion system that burns the residue in the smoke from the first burn, so it’s very clean. I not sure about the name; it sounds like we’re going to war with the elements, and it makes me wonder what happened to Intrepid I. (I guess it’s a rugged New England thing: the Vermong Castings company’s other stoves include the Defiant, the Vigilant, the Resolute Acclaim. )

We’ve had all kinds of advice about the stove placement. The architect first had it in the middle of the dining room—the first thing you saw when you entered the house. M’s mom, without seeing the design, had the same idea. But we know how little we’ll probably be using it, and this is a beach house, not a mountain house, so it’s going in a corner—a prominent corner, but a corner all the same. I just can’t see making a heating system, no matter how appealing, the center of this place. I can appreciate the romance of a hearth but I’m more interested in its function. After all, we've got the sunset, all 6000C degrees of it, setting just out the window.