Unit Bathroom

POSTED BY DANNY CHOO On Tue 2007/04/17 19:10 JST in Japan

Took this picture of a unit bathroom when we stayed at Zao recently. A unit bathroom is basically a huge sheet of plastic which has been molded into the shape you see. This is how you can do the three S's in Japan all within a square meter (Shit, Shave n Shower).
The lack of space in Japan lead to the development of these units which was actually the first bathroom that I encountered when I first came to Japan many moons ago. These Looked pretty cool to me at the time and I thought that all bathrooms in Japan looked like this! A typical bathroom however looks similar to these.
Just to give you an idea of how small it is, when you sit for you daily dump, your knees nearly reach the door. Is Japan the only place in the world with bathrooms like this? Would you swap one of these with what you currently use?