How to Use a Japanese Toilet: The Buttons, the Squat Type, and the Slippers

The single most useful thing to know about a Japanese toilet is that the button that flushes it is usually not on the panel covered in buttons. The illuminated side panel controls the washing functions. Flushing is typically a separate lever on the cistern, a plate on the wall, or a sensor you wave a hand at. Travellers who press every button on the panel looking for the flush are pressing the spray controls.

Since January 2017, the washing-function symbols have been standardised. The Japan Sanitary Equipment Industry Association published a set of eight standard pictograms for toilet operation panels, with the stated goal of "a toilet environment that anyone can use with confidence." Learn those eight and modern panels read the same everywhere.

Information as of 2026-08-18. Standardisation is voluntary and applies to newer units — older toilets, and some hotel and restaurant models, still use their own layouts.

The eight standard symbols

The association's set covers:

Find the stop button before you press anything else. It is the one control you will actually need in a hurry, and it is often the largest or a different colour. On Japanese-only panels it is marked 止 or 止水.

Other common buttons that sit outside the standard set: water pressure (水勢) and nozzle position adjustment, a seat-temperature control, a deodoriser, and on public toilets in Japan a sound button — 音姫 (otohime, "sound princess") — which plays a flushing noise to mask other sounds. It saves water that people would otherwise use by flushing repeatedly for privacy.

Finding the flush

In rough order of how often you'll meet them:

• A lever on the side of the cistern. Turn or push it. Two directions or two markings: 大 (dai) = large flush, 小 (shō) = small flush.
• A large plate or two buttons on the wall behind or beside the toilet, again marked 大 and 小.
• A sensor — a small panel with a hand icon. Hold your palm 5–10 cm in front of it. Do not touch it.
• On the control panel itself, on newer integrated units, marked with the large/small flush pictograms.

If you genuinely cannot find it, the sensor is the usual culprit — look for a small dark square at hand height on the wall.

The squat toilet (washiki)

Still common at older stations, parks, temples and rural facilities. Usage:

• Face the hooded end, the raised semicircular dome. This is the part most visitors get backwards — you face toward the hood, not away from it.
• Squat down fully, feet flat on the ridged platforms either side.
• Flush with the lever or handle, usually at the back or on the wall.

Where both types exist, signs on the cubicle doors distinguish them: 洋式 (yōshiki) is Western-style, 和式 (washiki) is squat.

Paper, and what not to flush

• Toilet paper goes in the bowl and is flushed. Japanese toilet paper is designed to dissolve. This differs from much of Asia — do not put paper in the bin.
• The small bin in the cubicle is for sanitary products, not paper.
• Nothing else goes in: wet wipes, even ones labelled flushable, cause problems.
• Some public toilets have no paper at all, and some have no hand towels or dryers. Carrying a small packet of tissues and a handkerchief is standard practice in Japan for exactly this reason — the free tissue packets handed out on city streets exist because of it.

Toilet slippers: the mistake everyone makes

In any place where you have removed your shoes at the entrance — a ryokan, a temple lodging, a traditional restaurant, a home, some clinics and schools — there will be a separate pair of slippers waiting just inside the toilet door.

Change into them. Then, crucially, change back out of them when you leave and leave them pointing into the toilet for the next person.

Walking back into the tatami room wearing the toilet slippers is the classic visitor error, and unlike most etiquette slips it is genuinely noticed, because the whole point of the separate pair is that the toilet floor is treated as a different cleanliness zone from the rest of the building. If you are already learning when to take your shoes off, this is the corollary rule.

Accessible and multi-purpose cubicles

Larger stations and department stores have a multi-purpose toilet (多目的トイレ), roomier and fitted with a baby seat, a fold-down changing board and grab rails. They are for anyone who needs the space — wheelchair users, parents with small children, people with ostomies or luggage. There is also usually an emergency call button on the wall, marked 呼出 and typically red. It is not the flush. Pressing it summons staff.

Quick summary

1. Sit down. The seat may be heated; that is normal.
2. Ignore the side panel unless you want the spray. If you use it, find 止 / stop first.
3. Flush with the lever, wall plate or sensor — not usually the panel.
4. Paper in the bowl, sanitary items in the bin, nothing else.
5. If you changed into toilet slippers, change back out of them.

Sources: Japan Sanitary Equipment Industry Association, "Standard pictogram" (Toilet Navigation); Japan Sanitary Equipment Industry Association guidelines for bidet-toilet operation pictograms, in force from April 2017.