Belief in Toilet

I don’t have any particular religion. However, I can say, “Cleaning the toilet is my belief.”

As you pray day to day, I clean our toilet as my daily ritual. As you talk to the God, I do to our toilet. It is not a joke; I am quite sure nowadays a lot of other Japanese are executing this daily ritual as well.

This new religion started a few years back in Japan. One actress wrote a book about how she could clear three million dollars of debt and how she could get out from bad routine. According to her, though I haven’t read the book, you should clean your residence—especially the toilet (as it’s directly related to prosperity)—if you wish to be fortunate. Throw out your bad luck altogether with crap in your closet when you wish to attract brand new good luck. Probably it’s a sort of converted Feng-shui.

This is the way “toilet religion” started and somehow this conventional religion grabbed my heart. Maybe because my boyfriend’s company was not doing well (he was literally penniless), or because I just moved to Singapore from Thailand, or just because we’ve started living together. There were tons of reasons to feel anxious. Instead of nagging at him, I started cleaning the toilet, thinking that even if it didn’t do anything to our prosperity, cleaning the toilet was worth much more than having quarrels and feeling miserable. As I didn’t want to look down on myself for picking up wrong man, I cleaned the toilet, wishing things to flow to the better destinations. I desperately wanted to believe my gut feeling about our relationship and the future.

And apparently, that was the only thing I could do to improve our situation at that time. As I also didn’t have money, I couldn’t move out, I couldn’t do a part-time job in addition to daytime job, being a foreigner in Singapore.

Two years have passed since then. Hallelujah, I was lucky enough to be heard by toilet god. We are still together and unbelievably better off. And you know what? This morning, my boyfriend—who hates all sorts of superstitions—recommended that I clean our toilet up even more for our retirement. Maybe it’s time for me to install a brush, sacred tool, for him.