Some things don't need too much innovation

I’ve never been there, but I always imagine Tokyo to be a classy city, but I have to say that the city planners have come up with possibly the worst idea in modern history: re-imagined public restrooms: The Tokyo Toilet Project.

Apparently, though Tokyo is known for its cleanliness, its residents don’t like to use the public restrooms, wrote Hannah Frishberg for the New York Post, so the solution was to get known designers to design public restrooms to get people to take a cue from the designers, ditch their negative preconceptions and use the public restrooms.

One bright red bathroom is inspired by a traditional Japanese decorative wrapping method called origata, and it has individual toilet entrances, Frishberg said. And another one, the “Squid Toilet,” simply has a cool roof.

These are both good designs. I mean, going to the bathroom is a pretty basic, sometimes immediate, need so, sure, go ahead and make the bathroom aesthetically pleasing, but functional is the key, right. No need for complication to stir up or create any bathroom phobias.

So, of course, you know what happened. This is, after all, a bathroom design competition, and this makes the moto automatically default to “go outlandish or go to an outhouse.”

One creator called his public bathroom design “ambiguous space.” Yes, a restroom described as ambiguous, it’s like a foreshadowing for an awkward toilet-based disaster.

The design lives up to its name.

“Ambiguous space” has 15 concrete walls which are randomly combined to form two bathrooms for specific genders and between those two toilets is on all-gender toilet. Some degree of accuracy is required in locating the proper stall, and yet “randomly combined” walls equates to “haphazard maze.”

I don’t know about you, and I apologize if talking about bathroom-related topics bother’s you, but if I and the public-toilet phobic population of Tokyo have finally decided our bathroom needs are greater than our dislike of public toilets, we don’t have time for a maze hunt. We barely have time to unzip. We don’t want to keep dancing around until we find the right door, or we might need to just go straight to an adult changing station.

But that is far from the worst idea yet.

You know how one of the most common nightmares is the one where you’re naked in public and there’s a closely related one about sitting down to use a toilet and finding out that you have ascended the throne in a very public place. Welcome to Tokyo’s crown jewel: The glass-walled bathroom.

Yes. Glass walled. Clear glass walled.

Oh sure, there’s some technology involved, so when you lock the door, the glass somehow turns opaque.

Consider this, though: Ever have a lock fail on a door thus allowing a complete stranger to walk into a bathroom while you are occupying the throne? If the lock on the glass bathroom fails, there’s no “Ooops, this one’s occupied,” the door gets closed, and your good to carry on.

Think about it for a minute. That lock fails … the whole world sees you sitting there or whatever … and your only protection to stop at whatever moment you are in, get yourself together and walk over to the door and either reset the lock or abandon the building … in whatever state you’re in.

Glass bathroom designer Shigeru Ban said he went with glass so that when people walk up to the bathroom they’ll know if it’s occupied and if it’s clean.

I’m pretty sure it’s glass so that when people walk up to it they’ll know they were right about not using public bathroom.

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Maybe he was inspired by Wonder Woman’s invisible jet, but still, my answer is “Oh h*!! no” at [email protected].