Asia in 3 minutes: From a toilet revolution in Japan to Vegemite’s return to Australia
A round-up of the biggest stories in Asia this week
Foreigners offered less surprising Japanese toilet experience
Navigating the array of buttons on Japan’s hi-tech toilets can be a disconcerting experience for the uninitiated who, expecting to hear a familiar flushing sound, are instead subjected to a sudden, and unwanted, cleansing of the nether regions. As Japan prepares for an influx of overseas visitors during the 2019 Rugby World Cup and the Tokyo Olympics in 2020, the country’s sanitation industry has agreed to standardise pictograms on toilets so users know for certain if they are about to receive a blast of warm air or jet of water. Nine manufacturers will soon start using the same eight symbols to explain the buttons found on their state-of-the-art toilets.
What next? The eight new symbols will show users how to flush, open and close the lid, activate the (front and back) cleaning and drying functions, and trigger the off switch. They will be on toilets sold in Japan from April.
Duterte suggests Filipino priests and bishops should give meth a try
Rodrigo Duterte, the president of the Philippines, has suggested the country’s Catholic priests and bishops should take the highly addictive drug crystal methamphetamine, as he accused them of hypocrisy for criticising his deadly drug war. Duterte launched his broadside in response to the powerful Catholic Church mounting a campaign to stop the killings in his anti-drugs drive, which has killed about 6,000 people in less than seven months. “The [critical] priests should take shabu to understand. I recommend one or two of the bishops take it also,” Duterte said, using the local term for crystal meth, the country’s most common illegal drug.
Duterte said that while parish priests around the country were well aware of the extent of the illegal drug problem, their leaders who had been railing against extrajudicial killings were clueless.
What next? After largely keeping quiet over the drug war for months, church leaders are now heading a campaign to have their flock denounce the killings. Over the coming weeks, the church also plans to train widows and other female relatives of men killed in mainly slum communities to document the deaths so they can bring criminal charges against police.