Baffies

Japan is a land of many slippers.　You have to take slippers to your work to wear inside the building once you get there. There are house slippers and guest slippers and public slippers in schools, museums, hospitals (don't want to be wearing them after the guy getting the veruca treatment!) and restaurants. There really are a dazzling number of footwear changes to navigate in an average day here. Every gaijin's favourite must however be the toilet slippers. You wear your house slippers as far as the door of the lav, then change into the slippers, which are usually plastic and emblazoned with a widdling cherub, for the duration of your stay in there, then change back to the house slippers on your way out again. I might add that the average Japanese toilet room is about 3ft square and there is no need to even take a full step to reach the cludgy.We hear many a tale of hapless gaijin turning up at interviews , weddings and concerts still wearing their pink toilet slippers.

None of this is new, and I'm not prone to commenting on the superficial cultural foibles of Japan here, but I found myself laughing out loud the other night, as Mairi and I carefully stepped into our matching scarlet toilet slippers in the changing room toilet at a local hot spring bath house, while wearing absolutely nothing else!

I'll leave you with that tantalizing image for now....