Junko Kobayashi is the nation's top toilet designer.

`A society that gives toilets their due is a society that values life. That's the kind of thinking I want to encourage.' JUNKO KOBAYASHI Rest room designer

We all use them. So why should they be dark, filthy, smelly and frightening? Yet until quite recently, most public toilets were unpleasant places indeed.

No longer. Today, restrooms in station buildings and other venues of mass congregation are as likely as not to feature automatic washers, automatic flushers, and various other installations aimed at making your visit as pleasant as possible. Building owners have come to realize how strong an impression toilet facilities make.

Facilities that are in good order speak well of the building as a whole.

Few public toilets offer a broader vista than the lavatories on the 38th floor of the Sapporo Station JR Tower, which opened in March 2003. Right before your eyes, as you accomplish the task that brought you there, spreads a vast urban panorama, 160 meters above ground. The concept is the brainchild of the nation's leading toilet designer, 59-year-old architect Junko Kobayashi.

Kobayashi has designed the lavatories for no fewer than 78 public buildings across Japan, from Canal City in Hakata, Fukuoka Prefecture, to JR Tokyo and Shinagawa stations (where users are expected to leave a tip) and Matsuzakaya department store in Nagoya. She knows the importance of small details-hooks for bags and parcels, for instance. To ease congestion in the ladies loo, she pioneered a central arrangement for wash basins that facilitates the flow of crowds.

Kobayashi heads a five-person team of architects, and hers is apparently the only firm in Japan specializing in toilet design.

Her bolder ideas do not go unchallenged.

``Is this really necessary?'' is a typical response from building owners to her toilet beautification proposals. The translucent ceiling she favors for the makeup area in ladies washrooms, for example, expresses brightness, which is the effect she wants, but it clashes with the imposing image building owners like to convey. How daring can she be while still satisfying the client?

The search for an acceptable compromise requires frequent back-and-forth travel between her Tokyo office and wherever the building site happens to be.

``She overcomes the budget and other issues, and makes her plan work,'' says one building owner who has hired Kobayashi. ``She's very easy to work with. We would like another chance to get together again.''

Kobayashi came to toilet planning more by chance than by design. After graduating from Japan Women's University's department of housing and architecture, she took a job with a general contractor and then at an architect's office.

When her husband, a company employee, was transferred out of town, she went with him and worked as a homemaker for a while. But then she got restless and joined the staff of a local design firm.

Returning to Tokyo in 1987 after seven years away, she heard from a former colleague about a major project then getting under way.

This was the 500 million yen ``charm station''-public restrooms-at the approach to Seto Ohashi Bridge in Utazu, Kagawa Prefecture. At the time, there wasn't much literature available on the subject of lavatory design. Relying on her own feelings as a user of public restrooms, Kobayashi went ahead. Her design was noted and appreciated, and then, she smiles, it was a case of ``one toilet leading to another.'' Before she knew it, she was a specialist.

The times favored the new specialty. Japanese National Railways was being privatized, and train stations across the country were being renovated. School boards, too, were growing aware of the need for improvement in school toilet facilities.

``A toilet,'' Kobayashi likes to say, ``is like an airplane cockpit.'' Mobility is limited, and you must make do with whatever is at hand. She compares a well-designed public lavatory to an oasis.

As she works on her designs for rest rooms across the country, she asks for input not only from potential users, but from cleaning staff as well.

Something about the toilet lends itself to grandiose conceptions. ``Toilets speak to people of all generations,'' Kobayashi says. ``All over the world, men, women and children of all ages use them. Toilets and the various national and cultural customs pertaining to excretion are pertinent to literature and to environmental problems. But whereas people readily put thought and effort into the food they eat, there is a tendency to dismiss excretion as a mere function of nature, not worthy of serious consideration. That's partly why public toilets were never given their due.''

Another reason was that toilets don't sell anything. Money available for renovation tended to go to commercial spaces where customers bought things. That rule of thumb, Kobayashi explains, began to bend during the economic bubble of the 1980s, when retail businesses and tourist spots competed furiously to attract shoppers and visitors.

Clean toilets began to be seen as an asset.

Demographics was another spur. Japan was aging, and gradually, the insight took hold that older people depend on lavatories that are easy to use.

And not only older people. ``For example, a young mother with a baby in a carriage needs lots of space. Someone with poor eyesight will appreciate brightness,'' Kobayashi says. ``You must respond to the different needs of different people. To do that, I make a point of asking the opinions of all kinds of people-people in wheelchairs, for example.''

So seriously has Tokyo's Keio department store come to regard the issue that it is spending 400 million yen-roughly the cost of remodeling an entire floor-on toilet renovation. That, too, is a Kobayashi project.

``Keio's plan is to specialize to the point where more than half of its customers are women over 50,'' she says. ``On the floor closest to the train station ticket gate, they are increasing the number of toilets from seven to 13. I'm thinking of a universal design easily accessible to anyone-including, say, people with colostomy bags and the special needs they involve. Everyone who walks into a public rest room should be able to choose a toilet that meets his or her needs.''

If Kobayashi's thriving business is any indication, that's an idea whose time has come.

Last year, her office, named Gondola, recorded 50 million yen in income from designing, about 80 percent of it from toilet-related projects.

For her, the completion of a design is not the end of the project.

``After everything's done, I talk to the cleaning staff to find out what problems they're having. If it's anything I can fix, I fix it. At Kanagawa Prefecture's JR Hiratsuka Station building I hold a meeting once every three months with the female company employees who use the restrooms and with the cleaners.''

What are Kobayashi's plans from here on in?

``Toilets and toilet functions are things you pretty much take for granted as long as you're healthy,'' she says.

``But for the sick, the elderly and the bedridden, going to the toilet becomes a major concern. The toilet is, if I may put it this way, the ultimate bastion of human dignity. ``A society that gives toilets their due is a society that values life. That's the kind of thinking I want to encourage.''(IHT/Asahi: October 30,2004) (10/30)