Lately in the news, Otohime is a small device with one button, usually attached to walls of public toilet cubicles in Japan. Square and white, with a loudspeaker behind small perforations in the plastic housing, it resembles a mix between a Walkman and hospital radio. When pressed, the Otohime plays a twenty-five second recording of a flushing toilet.
Otohime is a clever play on words: in Japanese fairy tales, Princess Oto is the daughter of the God of the Sea, therefore evoking water. Written with the homophone character “oto” for sound, it becomes “sound princess.” But what is it for? Why artificially recreate a sound that the toilet already makes?
Originally introduced in 1988 by TOTO, the prime purveyor of Japanese toilets, the Otohime was meant to curb the excessive use of water caused by flushing more than once. Many women would flush the toilet first to conceal unseemly sounds, then a second time to make the shameful product disappear. The invention was well-intentioned. According to TOTO’s promotional material, the installation of an Otohime device in an office with 400 women could save 5,5 million liters of water, or roughly 25,000 USD a year. Socially it was meant to help women to feel less vulnerable, less exposed. But the Otohime’s meanings are in fact more complicated.
Shame is often located in the body, and can be experienced—most keenly as a kind of betrayal— when the body acts outside of the subject’s control. People are often ashamed when something is revealed that they wish to keep concealed. Shame thus requires either a real or imagined other that witnesses the shameful act. Shame thus also marks the boundary between the natural process of digestion and the constraints put on an encultured and, by the same token, gendered body. The Otohime helps to conceal the animal part of excretion and to maintain the illusion of an anodyne, docile body.
The striking fact that only women appear as problematic double-flushers tells a powerful story about gendered expectations in Japan. Especially female bodies should be tightly controlled, unobtrusive, silent, literally without a voice. The gendered technology of the Otohime—like any technological fix for a social problem—provides a solution that entrenches these normative ideas: the excreting body is not made abject, but rendered inaudible and therefore invisible.
Although men are widely assumed to be less fussy about their bodily functions, during the 2010s Otohime devices have slowly spread to male and gender-neutral toilets as well. It remains to be seen whether the normative ideas about modesty carried by the technology will influence how male and transgender users experience shame.
Since 2011, the more prosaic sound of the toilet flush has been replaced by the sound of a babbling brook interspersed with the sound of birds. This improvement was meant to create a more relaxed atmosphere: peaceful and serene, made familiar by thousands of years of poetry—an artificial and domesticated second nature, covering the more unruly and occasionally explosive sounds of actual bodies.
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Art by Lara Schaberg
