An excruciating five-minute wait prompted Manami Momose to embark on a multiyear research project concerning “toilet disparity” at public restrooms.

The incident occurred in July 2022, when Momose traveled to western Japan to attend a music concert.

She arrived at JR Kurashiki Station in Okayama Prefecture following a two-and-half-hour train ride from Matsue, Shimane Prefecture, and dashed to a public restroom. But around five women were already waiting in line.

She had to go bad and kept thinking: “Somebody. Anybody. Please finish immediately!”

After finally finding relief, Momose was flabbergasted when she saw a sign at the restroom entrance showing the men’s area had four urinals and three toilets. The women’s area had only four stalls.

The setup, she felt, was unfair to women.

“Women usually need much more time than men to use the toilet because they have to pull their clothing up and down and change pads during menstruation,” said Momose, a Tokyo resident who works as an administrative procedures specialist.

Since then, she has been on a self-imposed mission to determine the situation of public restrooms around Japan.

Whenever she goes out, she makes sure to count how many toilets are available in women’s restrooms as opposed to men’s, including urinals.

By January this year, Momose had tallies for public restrooms at 706 locations across Japan, such as train and subway stations, airports, concert halls and commercial complexes open to the general population.

The findings showed that the total number of men’s toilets and urinals was 1.76 times the figure for women’s toilets.

Men had more toilet facilities than women at more than 90 percent of restrooms at these locations.

This was the case even in commercial complexes where women represented a disproportionate share of the customers.

At only 28 of the 706 locations, women had more toilet facilities than men.

One flagrant example of women’s restricted restroom access was at JR Hachioji Station in the western suburbs of Tokyo.

When Momose went there to see a relative, she found six stalls for women in the public restroom at the station. The men’s restroom had 17, including 10 urinals, for a ratio of 1:2.83.

A diagram at the train station indicated the toilet blocks for men and women were about the same size.

Momose uploaded a picture of the diagram on the X social media platform to decry what she called unfairness to women concerning public restrooms.

Many responses expressed support for her views.

“I, too, have felt that this is wrong,” said a female poster.
“I had thought that we had no choice but to wait in line to access toilets,” said another.

But some disagreed with Momose’s argument.

“Since the restroom spaces are similar, men and women are treated equal,” said one.

Another poster said Momose was asking for too much.

Momose said the issue is not about space but the inequal speed in accessing toilets.

“You may say treatment is equitable if the spaces for toilet blocks are more or less the same, but toilet equity can be achieved only when waiting times are equal for men and women,” she said. “At the very least, toilet facilities for women should be increased to the same number for men.”

East Japan Railway Co. (JR East) said it maintains public restrooms at about 1,100 locations in the greater Tokyo area, including JR Hachioji Station, as well as in eastern Japan.

But it said it does not have details on the number of urinals and stalls for men and women when asked by The Asahi Shimbun.

A JR East official noted the company has installed more toilets for men than women at train stations, given that male commuters outnumber their female counterparts.

JR East’s guidelines drawn up in 2002 say that decisions on the number of new toilets needed at certain stations should take into account such factors as total number of passengers, the ratio of men and women, and peak-hour concentrations.

Regarding waiting times for men and women, the company only said it was looking into the subject.

EASY ACCESS FOR EVERYONE

Atsushi Kato, a representative director of Japan Toilet Labo, a nonprofit advocating enhanced accessibility of public restrooms for all people, said there was an insufficient number of toilets for women at public transport hubs in Japan.

“An adequate number of facilities should be made available so that all kinds of people can easily use a toilet,” he said. “The actual situation of each restroom should be examined while factoring in the changing social environment and the disparity in speed of access between men and women.”

A 2016 transport ministry survey that received responses from 884 people found that accessibility is a big issue at public restrooms in train stations.

Asked what they find inconvenient or disagreeable with at such facilities, 44.0 percent of women in the survey chose “waiting in line.”

The share of men who selected the same answer was 31.3 percent.

For restrooms at large-scale commercial facilities, 47.6 percent of women cited waiting in line, compared with 15.5 percent of men who answered likewise.

SLOW FIXES

Progress to rectify the situation has been made, albeit slowly.

Work is under way to improve women’s access to toilets at airports and service areas on motorways, places that are spacious enough to introduce more user-friendly steps, according to Kato.

Theater halls and other venues where toilet use is concentrated on certain hours of the day are also moving to accommodate women’s needs.

Momose’s research showed that of the 28 locations where women had more toilets than men, nearly half of them were at such venues.

Highway operator Central Nippon Expressway Co. has been grappling with the restroom congestion issue since 2012.

It has set a target of “no longer than a two-minute wait” at its service and parking areas. The two-minute rule was adopted after it conducted a questionnaire of users and studied other data.

Before 2012, Central Nippon Expressway had calculated the number of necessary toilet facilities based on vehicle capacity of each parking lot, as well as a relevant coefficient.

But some restrooms still consistently had long waiting lines.
The company switched to the current formula to find the optimal number after closely studying data on the number of users and other details about those restrooms.

Local governments have also begun to address the toilet issue.

The Hagi city government in Yamaguchi Prefecture put a rule in place in 2011 that said women’s toilets should outnumber those for men by a 2:1 ratio at public facilities.

The rule was updated in 2017 to count men’s urinals, not toilets to apply in the ratio.

The change was meant to cut waiting times for women, particularly during events.

Businesses are also reviewing existing blueprints in the face of growing numbers of female workers at offices.

The Society of Heating, Air-Conditioning and Sanitary Engineers of Japan, an organization of engineers and specialists in academia, recommended a 5:5 ratio for men and women for feedwater and drainage equipment in 2009 to rectify the 8:1 ratio in favor of men.

Internationally, the Sphere Handbook, which has been used by the Red Cross and nongovernmental aid organizations, dictates a ratio of 3:1 for female to male toilets as a universal minimum standard for refugee camps and evacuation centers.

Taiwan is more generous to women.

According to Taiwanese media, the island enacted a law in 2010 that set a toilet ratio of 5:1 for women and men at schools and train stations, and a ratio of 3:1 at offices.

Britain’s Royal Society for Public Health said in a 2019 report that Canada and some U.S. states had established “potty parity” laws that require consideration for usage times of men and women when deciding the number of toilets to be installed.

The report recommended a ratio of at least 2:1 in favor of women for toilet facilities.

DEEP-ROOTED PROBLEM

Kimio Ito, professor emeritus of men’s studies at Kyoto University, said toilet inequality is a “classic example of gender disparity” in Japan.

Ito pointed out the unequal access about 30 years ago in one of his books.

“Even if the space is the same for men’s and women’s toilets, it does not necessarily mean that equal access is achieved,” he said. “That the issue of toilet parity remains largely unresolved even today suggests that the gender gap in this country is a deep-rooted problem.”

Ito noted that most structures were built based on the notion that men would be the main users of toilet facilities. But society has finally recognized the inconvenience women have had to bear.

“We should create facilities that can meet the diverse needs of people, including sexual minorities and people with disabilities,” he said.

(This article was written by Kayoko Sekiguchi, Tomoko Yamashita and Takahiro Ogawa.)