The Horrors of Toilet Cleaning Day

Japanese schools pride themselves on a holistic education, meaning they'll teach kids everything from math and science to how to properly pee into a cup for the medical exam. This past Sunday was a good example of one of the stranger things students have to learn: how to properly clean a toilet.

The whole idea immediately infuriated me because they made these kids (and us teachers) come in during a Sunday in the middle of summer vacation. Members of the PTA also had to show up to help with the festivities. I toyed with the idea of pulling my gaijin card and skipping out on it but I thought I'd show up and get some brownie points with the school. After all, how long could we really be cleaning toilets....right?

I show up right in time to see that toilet cleaning day is going to be a much bigger deal than I originally thought. Banners were hung from the gym and all the students and teachers were strictly divided up into groups under a toilet cleaning specialist. Like everything else in Japan, we spent about a half an hour going over each minuscule detail about the day and listening to speeches from the principal, vice-principal, head of the pta, etc. Once we finished it was finally time to go to our designated cleaning areas.

I was assigned to the male staff teacher's bathroom. This is probably the smallest bathroom in the school as it only has two urinals, a squatty potty and a sink. 8 students, two PTA parents, the cleaning specialist and I were placed in this one small bathroom to make it clean. Considering that the 12 of us could barely even fit into the bathroom together, I thought we'd be done in 20 minutes at most. Unfortunately, this was due to a momentary brain lapse that caused me to forget I was in Japan.

We spent about 20 minutes just having the cleaning specialist explaining how to clean everything. The cleaning only consisted of scrubbing the toilet with a special cleaner, yet is still took 20 minutes to explain. Three of the students were assigned to the toilets and the cleaning specialist looked for other things around for us to clean.

First I ended up just cleaning this plastic cover for the florescent light. It being plastic, it was able to clean it in about 30 seconds, but the cleaning nazi made me scrub it for about 15 minutes. After that, I was given a drain cover and was told I needed to clean it with a toothbrush. I spend at least another 20 minutes cleaning that stupid thing. I was really beginning to wonder how much longer I was going to be there.

Meanwhile, the same three students had been cleaning the same toilets in the exact same way for a good 40 minutes and were beginning to become understandably agitated. The toilets were deep cleaned and they weren't going any cleaner, but the cleaning nazi forced them to continue scrubbing. It turns out that the cleaning was based on a time limit and we still had over an hour to go.

After almost getting carpal tunnel syndrome from cleaning the drain cover for 20 minutes, I was assigned the even more pointless task of scrubbing the concrete walls with a wet sponge. After an invigorating 20 minutes of wetting the walls, I then had to clean the edges of the door with a toothbrush for about 15 minutes. All this time the same three students were scrubbing the same three toilets and were really beginning to slack on their tasks for some reason...

With about 30 minutes left the end was in sight. The toilet kids could finally take a break as we all had to gather to scrub the floor. This took about 20 minutes in spite of about 10 people all cleaning the floor at the same time. We spent the last 10 or so minutes actually cleaning the cleaning equipment, which would have made me crack if I hadn't been so dead tired.

We were finally free to return to the gym where they had a lunch of curry rice waiting for us. We had to eat in our cleaning groups so I wasn't quite free of the cleaning nazi, but it was good enough to just be able to sit and eat. After lunch we had to sit through about another half hour of speeches by the students in the different groups talking about how tired they were but how happy they were to have learned so much about cleaning. Brainwashing complete.

After it was over, all the teachers just went to the teachers room and started planning a post-cleaning day drinking party. I ran out the door as fast as I could...