Toilet meal

In a 2013 survey, about 12% of respondents said they had had a toilet meal.[9]

Social research has been conducted to find out how many people have eaten a meal in a toilet. Although figures vary depending on the survey, in the largest, conducted in 2013, 12.08% of respondents said they had eaten in the toilet.[9] The percentage of "young people was relatively high", as was that of women.[9]

• In 2009, Naoki Ogi, a professor at Hosei University, surveyed 487 students and received 400 responses. 0.3% of the respondents answered "often" and 2.0% of the respondents answered "a little" making a total of 2.3% of the respondents who had eaten lunch in university toilets.[10]
• In a survey of 1,000 people conducted by Mynavi News in 2012, 7.1% had eaten meals in the toilet.[11]
• In a survey conducted by home renovation company SunRefreHoldings in 2013, out of 2,459 valid responses, 12% had eaten in a public restroom at home, school, or work, 19% in their 20s, 13% in their 30s, and 11% in their teens. An overwhelming 80% of women in their twenties stated they had eaten a "toilet meal", many of them in public restrooms.[9][2]
• In a 2015 nationwide survey of 1,500 Japanese men and women in their 20s to 60s by the news site Shirabe, 5.5% said they had eaten in a toilet.[12]
• In a 2017 survey of 1,342 men and women in their 20s to 60s, also by Sirabee, 10.2% said they had eaten in the toilet. By gender, 11.9% of men and 8.5% of women said they had eaten in the toilet, a slightly higher percentage for men. When Shirabe talked to those who reported having eaten in the toilet, they gave reasons such as wanting to save money on lunch, having trouble refusing invitations, and being cool and comfortable.[3]

A private toilet room is a private space, and there are few detailed regulations on conduct in the terms and conditions of use. Normally, hiding and eating in a private toilet room does not pose a problem, as it is impossible to distinguish between regular users and diners from the outside. However, if a person using a private room leaves food debris or inconveniences other users, the toilet meal become a legal problem. On bengoshi.com, lawyer Ayako Nakagawa explains toilet eating from the perspective of a person who manages a facility.[13] She prefaces her article by saying: "If you belong to a school or a company, you can naturally use the restroom in the building, and eating food in a private restroom is not illegal in itself, so it is difficult to uniformly prohibit 'toilet meal' itself." She goes on to note that schools and companies can prohibit "toilet eating" based on their administrative authority if the behavior causes inconvenience to others, such as occupying a private room for a long time and preventing others from using it, or leaving food scraps or garbage and causing sanitary problems. Theoretically, if the prohibition of "toilet meal" is made known, for example by a sign, and someone nonetheless eats in the toilet, the school or company may ask that person to leave, and if they do not do so, may apply the criminal law of non-expulsion.[13] However, since it is not realistic to attempt to prohibit actions in private rooms, it is suggested that a practical solution would be to call on users to strictly follow good behaviour rules, such as not occupying the toilet for a long time and taking garbage home.[13]

Eating in a toilet is not desirable from a hygiene standpoint. According to the Training Manual for School Meal Preparation Personnel published by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, "Since various pathogenic microorganisms exist in stool and are excreted with stool during defecation, toilets are places with a high risk of being contaminated by pathogens that cause food poisoning. During defecation, there is a high possibility of the toilet bowl being contaminated by norovirus and other pathogens, and of toilet doorknobs, etc. being contaminated through the hands and fingers."[14] The report devotes pages to lavatories as a place where food handlers need to take special care.

There are three types of private toilet rooms in Japan: multipurpose toilets, private rooms with Western-style raised toilet bowls, and private rooms with Japanese-style floor toilet bowls. In 2021, the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport, and Tourism (MLIT) revised the design guidelines for buildings with the aim of dispersing users of multipurpose toilets,[15] but the guidelines do not assume "meals" as the purpose of use of multipurpose toilets.[16]

Sitting position

Crouching position

Standing position

Since private lavatory rooms are not designed for eating, ingenuity is required. Eating postures vary from person to person, but typically people sit on the lid of a Western-style toilet, crouch in front of the toilet, or stand in front of a Japanese-style squat toilet, which is at floor level.

One of the reasons why people eat toilet meals is to avoid being seen as alone, and some people consider this a social issue that needs to be solved. In Japanese social life, attractiveness is often measured by the number of friends a person has, and those who are seen as friendless are often evaluated negatively on that basis alone. During lunch and other free-time activities, people tend to congregate with their friends, and the number of friends they have becomes very visible. Therefore, people who fear being perceived as friendless and unattractive secretly eat in the toilet. Daisuke Tsuji, an associate professor of sociology at Osaka University, wrote in Asahi Shimbun:"Those who fail to make friends within a limited relationship must continue to endure not only loneliness but also the gaze of being branded as a strange person with no friends. They are marginalized in a double sense. The only place left to escape the gaze is the private room in the bathroom."[21][22] Tsuji believes that the solution to the problem is to "create an environment in which children and young people can form diverse relationships outside of their peer group, including a review of the class system", and that the problem of the toilet meal can be solved by supplementing multi-layered human relationships.[23]

On the other hand, in an article titled "A Study on 'Toilet meal': Psychologism in Universities", Yu Ninomiya, an associate professor of sociology at Gunma University, argues that although the toilet meal phenomenon occurs in the interaction between toilet meal eaters and other people, psychology or psychology-style knowledge is used to attribute the event only to the mental problems of toilet meal eaters.[24] Ninomiya argues that there is an "epistemological fallacy" in the understanding that the problem of the toilet meal can only be solved at the individual level between the parties involved and psychological professionals, and that it is necessary to convey to students that it is wrong to consider socially constructed "problems" as "problems" to be solved by individuals. Furthermore, he raises the question of whether eating in the toilet is necessarily a "problem" that requires social intervention in the first place. According to Ninomiya, toilet eating can be an appropriate choice to temporarily avoid conflicts those around one.

There is a movement at universities to address the issue of students eating toilet meals from the perspective of interpersonal communication. When the issue was first reported, there was little awareness that it was occurring. In response to inquiries by Asahi Shimbun in 2009, the University of Tokyo's public relations group said, "It may be that we just haven't noticed it, but we have never heard of it", and Meijo University's general policy department responded, "We don't recognize it, so we don't give any guidance."[5]

• In 2013, during an overnight orientation camp for new students, Shimane University's Faculty of Education circulated a questionnaire and found that 56.6% of the students were aware of the word "toilet meal". The department tried to reduce new students' problems by holding training sessions to build relationships with upperclassmen.[25]
• In a 2016 Kobe Gakuin University report on a survey of its own campus on "places to stay", 1.7% of students cited the restroom as a place to stay, citing Ninomiya's view that "we need to worry about situations such as 'toilet meal' by college students who eat lunch in the restroom" and, "We cannot deny the possibility that there are students at our university who consider the toilet to be their 'place of residence' because they avoid interacting with others or are unable to relate well with others."[26]
• According to a counselor at the Health Center of Hokkaido University, "There are actually students who eat their meals alone in the private rooms of the toilets", and for those students who cannot eat alone because they are worried about being seen, they have an activity called "lunch meeting" where they eat their meals with the staff and talk about various topics.[27]
• The student counseling office of Tokyo Fuji University has reported that students have told them they eat in the toilet, and that they advise students to "come to the student counseling office as soon as possible if you are troubled by such a thing".[28]

• Bathroom reading
• Toilets in Japan
• Mariko Aoki phenomenon