Years ago I lived in a small city called Nobeoka on the eastern side of the island of Kyushu in southern Japan. Nobeoka, as I remember it, is built on a coastal plain wedged between the Hyuga-Nada Sea on the east and steep mountains in every other direction. There was only one train track through the city, coming down from Saiki in the north, through Nobeoka, then along the coast to Hyuga in the south. Southbound trains would stop in stations so that northbound trains could continue on their way back toward Fukuoka, the largest city on Kyushu.

Nobeoka was the first Japanese city I called home. I lived there for six months and it served as my indoctrination into a world that was both completely alien and totally fascinating. I loved the food, the language, the land, and the people. Every morning, as I rode my bike through town, I marveled at the ingenious ways in which the Japanese had merged their world with the natural (and sometimes harsh) beauty that surrounded them. Green was everywhere – it surrounded the town in every direction but the east, blanketing the mountains that pinned Nobeoka against the sea. 

One thing that took a bit of getting used to was the toilets. Although I understand that Western toilets are very common in Japan now, in 1992 rural Japan they were neither unusual nor were they commonplace. At any given public restroom, you had a 50/50 chance at best that you were going to push a stall door open and find yourself face to face with a squatter.

Many gaijins are bothered by squatters. It can take a bit of getting used to if you haven’t grown up squatting in the brush on campouts to relieve yourself. Some gaijins had mental lists of which department stores and restaurants had western toilets and which did not, but that wasn’t me. I didn’t care. Once I had figured out the basic mechanics of the thing I was pretty comfortable with it.

Except for one time. One day, I rode my bike about 20 miles out of town to call on a family that lived fairly deep in the forested mountains around the town. The ride was spectacular and exhausting, winding up mountainous roads with steep drop-offs on one side and walls of rock and exploding greenness on the other. At last we arrived at the house we were looking for, a beautiful home in an idyllic forest glade. The house was old, at least a hundred years, probably much more. 

We enjoyed a fairly luxurious amount of food in this setting, sitting on cushions around a low table, chatting with the family and eating an endless stream of Japanese favorites as the day wore away and the evening sky fell. Just as my stomach was starting to become uncomfortably full, our host presented us with a plate of about ten disks of round cuts of meat, each about the size and thickness of a large coin. The meat was almost thawed – soft and red around the outside, still a bit frozen in the middle. A small amount of blood pooled around the edges of the meat, thin and watery. Shika sushi, the host informed us. Deer meat. Raw deer meat. “I shot it myself,” he added.

I’d never had shika sushi before, and I haven’t since, but I wish I could. It was delicious. The other gaijin who was there with me wasn’t so keen on the stuff, so I was able to eat more than my fair share. I won’t lie. I loved it. It was like nothing I had ever tasted before. My brain told me it was gross, unsafe, and unhealthy, but my tastebuds told me a different story. My intestines, on the other hand, told me that it was the last straw. It was time for me to go to the bathroom.

I’ve always been prone to overeating, even when I was young. I still am, and it shows. That night was no exception, and out of some perverse sense of politeness I waited until my need was urgent to inquire about the location of the toilet. In a house this old, I could hardly expect a western toilet, but what I found instead terrified me. It wasn’t that it was a squatter. I was fine with that. The problem was the tiny closet the squatter was in. It wasn’t build for 6’1″ Americans. It was built for somewhat shorter Japanese people. The ceiling was practically on top of me, and the room was just barely wider than I was, and not much deeper.

I stepped into the room, pulled the door to, and proceeded to squat. I stopped half-way down when my knees banged against the door and my butt hit the plumbing behind the toilet. I pulled up and looked at the squatter in disbelief – the room wasn’t deep enough, or I was too tall. I couldn’t squat OVER the toilet. My knees would bump up against the bathroom door, pushing my butt out of range of the squatter’s gaping hole no matter what I did.

My intestines let out a rumble. They were unhappy with me. I had taunted them with relief and then denied them. They weren’t having any of it, but what was I supposed to do? I couldn’t use that bathroom, not without missing the toilet or … Was there another option? I knew there was, but I didn’t like it. The bathroom was too close to the room in which people were still enjoying each other’s company. The bathroom door might even have been visible from there. Still… what choice did I have?

In the end, I did the only thing I could do, as quickly as I could manage it. I opened the door, letting it swing as wide as it needed to, then squatted over the ceramic hole in the floor and took care of business. It was loud, it was humiliating, and soon it was over. 

When I was finished, I collected my wits and prepared to face my friends. I decided that our hosts were probably embarrassed that their bathroom was so small and unlikely to comment. Only the American I had come with would be interested in humiliating me, and maybe he hadn’t noticed. There was a chance no one else was going to say anything about what had just happened, so why should I? I put on the most dignified face I could manage and stepped back into the main room as if nothing had happened.

No one said a word about the incident. Not then, not ever. Apparently my gastrointestinal exuberance had gone unnoticed by our host and by the other guest. Thank goodness. I knelt back down on the cushion, took a sip of my water, and helped myself to a dumpling. It was a great evening.

The Moral of the Story

What does this story have to do with software? How does it apply to software development?
 
A lot. Things don’t always work out the way they ought to. Sometimes you have to part with convention and do things a different way, just to make things work. Sometimes, you just have to do what needs to be done and not worry about what that means. Sometimes you have to do the best you can with the time and resources you've got and hope for the best.

Sometimes, the best that you can hope for is to simply avoid the worst case scenario. 

In my case, I had to settle for being happy that I didn’t wind up with a brick in my shorts and a 20 mile bike ride home.

Dave Christiansen
Writer. Maker. Programmer. Leader.