Being out of work has allowed a bit of an opportunity to do some poop reporting -- something I really haven't had a chance to do for quite a while. I ran across this article regarding
gold poop in Japan (login: b00y44@dodgeit.com pw: bugmenot) in a kind of "Dear Abby" for Japanese culture -- and it sheds a lot of light on the
Japanese relationship with poop.
Dear Alice,
While browsing through the souvenir shops on a recent layover at Narita Airport, I came across a very curious Japanese good-luck charm. It featured -- I kid you not -- a gold poop which, by the way, looked disturbingly like soft ice cream! Why poop? Why gold poop? Personally, I can't see anything felicitous in feces. Please tell me what the heck I'm missing.
-- Diane O., Redmond, Washington, USA
Dear Diane,
What you're missing is a pleasing piece of word play. The product you saw is called Kin no Unko (The Golden Poo), a name that plays on the fact that the Japanese word for poop (unko) starts with the same "oon" sound as a completely unrelated word that means "luck." Japanese enjoy this kind of pun -- traditional storytelling is full of them -- which may help explain why more than 2.5 million of the lucky little loads have sold in the last seven years.
{...} Professor Takeshi Mitsuhashi looked the product over carefully, nodded thoughtfully, and gave me just the story I had come for. Mitsuhashi explained that there are many word plays in Japanese religion because puns make information easier to teach and remember. One example is a talisman in the shape of a frog used to pray for the safe return of a loved one, the pun being that the word for frog (kaeru) is a synonym of the verb "to return." "This Golden Poo is very much part of that tradition," Mitsuhashi asserted.
Furthermore, there is a long history of poo-related worship in Japan, according to Mitsuhashi. "There are more gods in the Shinto religion than it is possible to count, and they reside just about everywhere, inhabiting natural things like trees, rocks and waterfalls," he said. "Bodily functions are very important -- think what a problem it would be if a person couldn't defecate or urinate properly -- so it's natural that people worshipped deities linked to these functions." Mitsuhashi, who is in his 60s, remembers his parents burying a pair of god figures, one male and one female, under the privy in his childhood home.
At the risk of getting too graphic, I really must address shape because everyone I spoke to brought it up. Diane, you described the Kin no Unko as looking "disturbing like soft ice cream," while Fujii, its creator, expressed it as a "nice tatsumaki-shape (tornado-shape)."
The difference in perception may lie in toilet types: a Japanese-style toilet consists of a shallow basin built into the floor over which you squat. There's little or no water in the basin until you flush the toilet. So to someone who grew up using Japanese-style toilets, a healthy result would be in the shape of a spiral pile.
The goose that laid the golden egg? No thanks, I'd much rather be the goof that laid the golden poop. PoopReport friends -- and you know who you are -- a preview of next year's Christmas presents!
