Travellers' Checks | After China, Japan plans toilet revolution: by 2020 Olympics in Tokyo public restrooms will all be hi-tech

Japan has an unusual fascination with toilets. You can buy models of various types in hobby shops or pick up a computerised toilet seat from airport duty-free shops, as I recently discovered in Hiroshima.

But the well-known and frequently reported hi-tech aspects of the nation’s lavatorial advances belie the fact that about 40 per cent of public toilets at the country’s popular tourist locations are of the squat type.

In an effort to reach its target of attracting 40 million tourists a year by 2020, the government is hoping to modernise all of them in time for that year’s Summer Olympics.

Double deco

Thailand’s U Hotels & Resorts will open its second Indonesian property, in Bandung, next month. The 119-room U Janevalla Bandung will allow guests to stay for a full 24 hours after they check in, and take breakfast “whenever, wherever” they choose in the hotel. Opening rates are advertised from US$63 per night including breakfast, until the end of October.

Marriott’s trendy Moxy brand, which launched in Milan, Italy, in 2014, also arrived in Bandung recently, as one of only three Moxy hotels in Asia (the other two are in Japan, in Osaka and Tokyo).

This apparently burgeoning university city saw an art-deco building boom in the 1920s and 30s, when it was known as the Paris of Java (at least by its Dutch colonisers), and many buildings from that era still exist, including a couple of hotels.

The more upmarket of the two is Hotel Bidakara Grand Savoy Homann Bandung (aka Savoy Homann) while just around the corner lurks the more attractive Prama Grand Preanger Bandung, which Hollywood legend Charlie Chaplin noted in 1932 as being the only hotel in Java where one could indulge “in a hotel bath in European fashion”. Both offer rooms from about HK$300, but the Savoy is alcohol-free.