interlude and chapter 2 of Derrick's Story

Interlude

If you know anything about Japanese culture, you will know that they will stop at nothing to help you; I wish, for my sake, that that aspect would not have been a part of Japanese culture for the hour during which this story took place. Unfortunately, it was.

Chapter Two: The Great Demise

We arrived in the teachers’ room, and joined the group of teachers that had arrived there since we had left on our excursion. My excursion buddy decided that this would be a good time to ask everyone if they knew of a western toilet in the school. Of course this was all going on in Japanese, all I heard was a bunch of noises and the words “western toilet.” With those two words all of the teachers had immediately looked over to where I was standing, with a puzzled look on their faces. They all began to have this long drawn out talk as to where a western toilet might be, when one of the teachers’ assistants started walking out the door and signaled for me to follow. She led me down the hall at a very brisk pace, and barged into the men’s bathroom without as much as a knock. She looked in the two stalls without success and then went into the girl’s bathroom right next door. At this point I had pretty much lost all hope of this actually being a viable alternative location where I might relieve myself at other times in the future, so I stayed outside of the bathroom until she came to the door and insisted that I come in; to my surprise there was a rather small western toilet that sat about a foot above the floor and about two inches from any of the four walls. I guess I could have gone with door open and my legs hanging out, but I did not think that that would be such a good idea especially in an elementary schools girl’s bathroom. So we gave up and walked back to the teachers’ room.