Written by Jonathan Wojcik
TWO SPOOKY TOILETS.
I've already been slower this year than most. It's the fourth of September, and I'm not even near twenty Halloween posts yet...am I losing touch, or is it just taking more and more these days for something to feel "article worthy?"Maybe 2017 is just a Halloween of sheer quality over quantity.
Today I'm going to talk about toilets, and eating out of them.
I've actually been sitting on this thing since spring, when I found it at Uwajimaya supermarket in Beaverton, Oregon. It's a lot smaller than the more famous location up in Seattle, but it's still a good source for Japanese foodstuffs you won't easily find elsewhere in the states, like this entire line of plastic, novelty toilets full of sugary toilet puke!
The commode is pretty easy to assemble, and of course, it's the kind they mostly only have in Japan and a few other countries. The more effective kind, mind you, that you squat over rather than sit down on. This has been proven the healthier way to expel your waste, but we Americans are one of those nations hell-bent on sit-down defecation.
BUT WAIT! Our toilet can't be naked! You just saw on the front of the box that these things are supposed to have faces, decorations and accessories, and in fact, there are several different styles available. Including...
YOUKAI TOILET! My spouse can read Japanese well enough to have translated Youkai Toilet's character bio, because of course these have character bios, though they're rather short and simple. Like any proper youkai, he "loves to frighten children"...but he's actually just lonely.
I love this face, too. It has all the token spooky features of a Japanese ghost, with one big, round, staring eye and one bruised, sunken one in a corpse-blue face we don't appreciate nearly enough on this side of the Pacific. There's also, you may have noticed, a funeral headband with a turd on it. Classy!
An Ofuda sticker is also included, which you may recognize as a tag used to bind or exorcise spirits. This also has a turd on it, and more or less says "evil spirit begone." It's pretty common to see these plastered right on the foreheads of Japanese undead and malevolent youkai, but there's no really elegant way to do that here, so I opted to put it on the underside of our toilet. It feels like the kind of secretive place it might have really gone, to ensure nobody ever frees this phantasm from its porcelain vessel. He may be "lonely," but that doesn't always mean he's not dangerous!
Additional stickers include foggy clouds, a couple of onibi (those little "ghost flames" synonymous with the paranormal) and a skull who may or may not really want to be here right now, the perfect sidekick to any spirit who has to use a crapper as a body, right? But that's not Youkai Toilet's only friend!
Two more stickers are a bit too large to put anywhere but the back of the toilet tank, but include a Chochin-Obake (paper lantern ghost) and a cat blatantly ripped off from the style of Yo-Kai Watch, but the flame on its tail is, of course, turd-shaped.
You ever wonder why Japan stylizes poop into that "ice cream swirl?"
I've heard anecdotally that it'll really look that way if you eat the average Japanese diet and use these squatting-style toilets, but you didn't hear that from me.
So, now comes the near FINAL touch:
We're actually instructed to cut out a part of the box itself to serve as a backdrop, and I guess that's where the larger stickers were really meant to go, but I'd rather not risk losing them on something that might not hold up over the years, because of course I'm still going to hang on to this thing with love and care for possibly decades to come. Youkai Toilet is now fully assembled, and we can finally do what we're supposed to do with him:
Packed with Youkai Toilet are two bags of candy powder, strawberry flavored and I think cola-flavored. I love those little froth-creature mascots. I love mascots in general. Nobody appreciates mascots like Tokyo. Tearing these open the way you're supposed to will actually decapitate these cuties, so I snipped the ends off with scissors instead.
And now, watch in amazement as I follow the visual instructions to the best of my ability:
Pour the packet in, add water to the top of the tank, and you'll get a juicy, awful mouthful of artificially fruit-flavored froth, which you're supposed to ingest with an included straw.
I know, I know, as soon as you heard this was some kind of gross candy you expected me to eat it and review it. Regrettably, as much as I'm all for the idea of slurping candy barf out of a haunted toilet's eager mouth, I absolutely cannot stomach the mediciney aftertaste of most fruit-flavored candy, and I could already smell a miasma of cough-syrupy vapor wafting from our plastic friend.
I did not ingest Youkai Toilet's mouth juices. I'm sorry.
BUT WAIT!
If it's any consolation, I've got a whole other, completely different haunted toilet to check out, too! This one came from a thrift shop in late July, which had somehow wound up with hundreds of the things and was selling them for only a buck each.
This one is a battery-operated bank, but I didn't have any spare change on me, so I used a pebble to demonstrate. Or maybe that's a peanut. I can't even remember.
Press your item down on the toilet's edge, and a pale, ghostly hand pops out to snatch it away. Adorable! Almost as adorable as the "MYSTERIOUS TOILET!" label on the lid, and the fact that the whole thing is bubblegum pink.
The absolute best think about Mysterious Toilet, however, isn't even the toilet itself, but the cardboard base it comes attached to. Flip it over, and you get one of the most beautiful, magnificent works of art I have ever laid eyes upon:
I hope you've enjoyed reading about my two spooky toilets, and I hope, like me, you have a natural inclination to ship them with each other. Can a Western-style haunted toilet that steals money learn to love a Japanese-style haunted toilet that vomits candy? I think so. At the very least, they'd be best friends, right?
Friends...
...To the END!!!
THE END! HAHA! IT'S A DEAD GHOST JOKE AND A BUTT JOKE!!!
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