Toilet Slippers

I began looking for a job in Japan in January 1991, five months before graduating from college. Until December 1990, my post-college plan was to follow my long-distance girlfriend to her home state of Virginia, work for a year as a private school teacher, and then enroll in law school at UVA. This plan suddenly changed when she began seeing someone else -- although she claimed her new relationship was just for fun until I graduated -- and I needed something else to do. The U.S. economy was in the tank (Bush recession #1), and I felt a strong need to get as far as I could from Harvard and Virginia after graduation.

I had been studying Japanese with no particular purpose in mind for the last three semesters. I never thought I would actually go to Japan. But, after breaking up with my girlfriend, Japan suddenly seemed like the ideal place to go after graduation. I had always wanted to live abroad, I reasoned, and couldn't I make myself more employable by perfecting my Japanese (which, in my ignorance, I thought would take only a year)? After all, in those days, there were pages and pages of jobs listed in the New York Times classifieds for Japanese speakers. Sure, the Japanese economy had slowed down too, but it would soon be roaring back, wouldn't it?

Thus, on a cold and miserable Cambridge day in January 1991, I figured the Japanese for "I have broken up with my girlfriend and I want to work in Japan," blurted this out to my surprised Japanese instructor at the end of class, and forever changed the course of my life. The Japanese instructors eventually found me a summer internship at Canon, Inc. as part of the Japanese department's internship program, and also learned of a one-year copyediting job at Look Japan magazine that traditionally went to a new Harvard graduate each year. By the time I graduated in June, I actually had two jobs lined up, a summer internship starting in June, and a magazine editing gig starting in September. I also did my own job search before graduating and, before my summer internship had ended, I even had my post-Look Japan job already lined up.

The Japanese department's summer internship program was impressive. Over the years, the instructors had established relationships with a number of major Japanese corporations that were eager to associate themselves with Harvard's brand, and students who had two years of Japanese instruction and good grades in their Japanese classes were eligible to participate. Included in the program was a comprehensive day-long orientation in Japanese etiquette and culture. Harvard had a vested interest in maintaining these relationships from year-to-year, and the instructors were keen for their students to reflect well on the department with how well-versed they were in Japanese culture and etiquette. The instructors also hoped to prevent a student destroying a relationship with a major cultural gaffe. The etiquette instruction covered everything from the need to prepare a self-introduction speech for the first day of our internships to remembering not to blow our noses in front of other people, a very bad faux pas.

It was in this orientation that I first learned about slipper culture. I knew already that Japanese people went shoeless in the house because we had a Japanese neighbor when I was a kid. I did not know about the complicated slipper rules, such as the fact that one never wears slippers on tatami mats, because slippers chew up tatami. What made an even greater impression on me was the rule about wearing different slippers in the toilet and in the rest of the house. Because bathrooms are considered unclean, Japanese keep toilet slippers and house slippers separate, and you are supposed to change into the toilet slippers when you use the toilet and then back into your regular slippers when you leave. Japanese frequently point to foreigners wearing the toilet slippers outside the toilet not only for the humor of it, but also as an example of non-Japanese people's supposed inability to assimilate Japanese customs and etiquette.

I don't know why this custom exists, and anyone with a different view should correct me, but I have a two-part theory. First, Shinto religion deals heavily with cleanliness and uncleanliness. Before entering a Shinto shrine, you must ritually wash your hands and mouth to purify yourself to enter. Death, being unclean, is left to the Buddhists to handle, which is why there are no Shinto funerals. Women were historically banned from many Shinto shrines and other sacred places because menstruation was thought to make them unclean and thus unfit for sacred spaces. The same holds for the sumo dohyo, where women are still forbidden to tread. Since toilets are unclean places, the Shinto legacy requires that toilet cooties are kept in the toilet and not spread through the rest of the house.

The second reason is much more mundane. Traditional-style Japanese toilets are porcelain lined holes in the ground over which you must squat to do your thing. It is much easier to miss one of these toilets than a western one, and wastes can more easily get onto shoes or places on the ground where you might tread on them and track them into the house. Thus, the Japanese toilet itself provided a practical reason for switching slippers at the toilet door and keeping the dirty toilet slippers in the toilet area. Even though most Japanese now use western-style toilets, the custom has become ingrained.

As a result, depending on the size of the toilet -- whether in a private home or in a dormitory or restaurant -- one or several pairs of rubber or plastic slippers are left in the toilet for everyone to use. (Apparently, Japanese people are afraid of the cooties on the bottom of the slippers, but not afraid of the cooties on the inside of the slippers from other people wearing them.)

In the etiquette lesson, I somehow missed the fact that toilet slippers were provided for common use and that people did not need to carry around their own personal pair of toilet slippers. When shopping for the things I would need in Japan, I duly bought two pairs, in different colors so I could distinguish them. When I decided to get ready for bed on my first night in the Canon Fujigaoka Dormitory No. 1, I slipped on my burgundy house slippers for the walk down the hall and grabbed my black toilet slippers along with my toiletries. I arrived at the toilet door, slipped off my house slippers and placed them alongside the other slippers there, put on my toilet slippers, slid open the sliding glass door and was about to step in when I saw . . . a dozen pairs of identical green vinyl toilet slippers inside the door for all to use and a couple of young men standing at urinals wearing those same green vinyl slippers. I experienced an "Oh, now I get it ..." moment as I recalled the etiquette lesson. Totally embarrassed, I quickly shut the door, high-tailed it back to my room, and put my "toilet" slippers away. I then returned to the toilet, slipped on the green plastic slippers, and hoped that no one had noticed. My "toilet" slippers remained in the back of a closet until they eventually became my replacement "house" slippers.