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Survey reveals disturbing statistics about if Japanese people wash hands after going to bathroom

Casey Baseel Jul 12, 2016
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Young women found to be surprisingly blasé about using soap.

Many foreign visitors to Japan often come away impressed with how remarkably clean it is. However, it looks like there’s one place that might not be so spotless: the hands of its people.

Creative Survey recently polled a group of 600 Japanese men and women (75 of each gender in their 20s, 30s, 40s, and 50s) about their bathroom habits, and came away with some pretty gross statistics regarding how many of them properly wash their hands after going to the bathroom.

▼ Responses by percentage to the question “Do you wash your hands after going to the bathroom?”

Almost one in five people polled said that they occasionally skip washing their hands after dropping a deuce or unleashing an uno. Things get more cringe-provoking still when examining the breakdown of how the respondents “wash” their hands.

▼ When you wash your hands, how do you wash them?

Only slightly more than 40 percent of those polled seemed to understand that the use of soap is really the deciding factor in whether or not you’re “washing” something (which is why walking around in the rain for five minutes doesn’t count as taking a shower). Also disturbing is the one percent of respondents who gave “other” as their answer. Hopefully they’re using moist towelettes, and not swirling their fingers in the toilet bowl on their way out of the stall.

This being a discussion of poor personal hygiene, the easy thing to do would be to blame men, traditionally the grubbier sex, for fouling up the results. At least in the case of the youngest respondents, though, it was the women who admitted to being lax in washing their hands.

▼ When you wash your hands, how do you wash them?

Men between the ages of 20 and 29, it turned out, were almost a third more likely to wash their hands than the overall average, whereas women in the same age group washed their hands with soap less frequently than the survey pool as a whole.

Now, this being a survey done in Japan, one could argue that the prevalence of bidet-equipped toilets makes hand-washing less important, since there’s ostensibly less use of the fingers and palms in cleaning oneself. Unfortunately, the percentage of bidet function users is smaller than that of non-soap users, and by a pretty wide margin.

▼ Do you use the toilet’s bidet function?

Crunch all the numbers, and there’s one thing we can take away from this: It’s probably a good thing that the standard greeting in Japan is bowing, not shaking hands.

Source: PR Times
Top image: Wikipedia/浪速丹治
Insert images: PR Times (edited by RocketNews24)

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