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The story
A survey by the Asahi Shimbun of public elementary and junior high schools across 72 major cities and wards found that the number of boys’ toilets (including urinals) outnumbers girls’ by 1.4 to 1. In the 5ch thread, some pointed to overseas examples of standing urinals for women, while others pushed back, arguing that stall-based girls’ restrooms are already favored in terms of cost and accommodation for sanitary products — with opinions further split over whether posters had actually witnessed lines forming.
Lines at women’s restrooms have become a social issue, driven by the gender gap in toilet numbers. What about schools? The Asahi Shimbun surveyed roughly 620,000 toilets total at public elementary and junior high schools across 72 major cities and wards, and found that the number of boys’ toilets (including urinals) came to 1.4 times that of girls’. This has led to disadvantages for female students, including wasting recess time standing in line or having to step out of class to use the restroom…(continues in the paid edition, 657 characters remaining)
Asahi Shimbun, August 23, 2026, 5:00 AM
Source: asahi.com / Original article here
What people said
Let's brainstorm some groundbreaking fix.
Where even is this lol
So everyone used to sneak off to the staff restroom instead.
No idea if that's still a thing now.
I used to poop in a different grade's restroom during class
I couldn't bring myself to poop in the restroom, so
I ended up crapping myself while lined up for school lunch service
Wait, female urinals are already pretty widespread overseas
Cost-wise, women's restrooms are already way more expensive
It's the women's restrooms that get the favorable design treatment
It's not really 'favoring' men — urinals are small, so you can cram a lot of them in a row
If you're jealous, just hook up a funnel and a hose and use one too
That's exactly why 5ch old dudes never grow out of it
So was Europe wrong to have standing urinals for women?
Nothing could be fairer than that
Like the restrooms at Kabukicho Tower?
https://livedoor.blogimg.jp/yagisannpo-rgbqqnrz/imgs/4/d/4dad27b2.jpg
The person with both hands braced on the sink has one leg bent at a weird angle too — looks like they're really about to lose it
Probably breaking out in a cold sweat
This is just cooking up a reason to skim some budget money, isn't it
Come on now
Yeah, now that you mention it, I never saw a line at the girls' restroom at school either
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HNrV3yZbQAA_lg8.jpg (a jab referencing China's famously partition-less public toilets)
Also, even if they built standing urinals now and cut the number of stalls, most women just wouldn't use the urinals anyway, so the stall lines would only get worse — that's obvious
Saying 'just install urinals' without thinking any of that through is pretty shortsighted lol
Just say that outright and add more stalls then — 'women functionally take longer.' But say that and you get hit with 'oh, so you're saying women are inferior?' — so instead people dodge it by making noise about 'men just happen to have more toilets'
With surveys, the desired conclusion usually comes first
and the methodology gets built to match it
Especially with the trash media (mass media) — flashing numbers to brainwash people into 'oh, so that's how it is' is standard practice
Not falling for it
Probably just people on their phones in the stalls
Just bringing in portable toilets like at a construction site would be cheaper
Let's get the Asahi Shimbun's own welfare and culture foundation to chip in a donation
https://imgur.com/a/towOCuu
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Just let them go straight into the sewer drain
That's basically classified state-secret-level information
Background and Key Points
The Asahi Shimbun survey covers public elementary and junior high schools in 72 of Japan’s largest cities and special wards, tallying roughly 620,000 toilets total and finding boys’ facilities (stalls plus urinals) outnumber girls’ by 1.4 to 1. This lands in a broader Japanese debate about “toilet queues” (トイレの行列) as a gender-equity issue, most visible at train stations, stadiums, and event venues, where women’s wait times are already a recognized public grievance; the Asahi piece extends that framing into schools. Also relevant for non-Japanese readers: Asahi is one of Japan’s largest and most liberal-leaning newspapers, and 5ch’s user base skews reflexively distrustful of its framing — several posts explicitly dismiss the survey as manufactured to justify budget spending, which colors how skeptically the numbers were received.
The thread didn’t split over whether a gap exists, but over what the raw count actually proves. One camp argued urinals are cheap and space-efficient, so a numerical “boys win 1.4x” figure is misleading since stalls (which both sexes’ facilities technically use, but girls’ exclusively) cost more per unit and already get favorable treatment. Others countered that stall-only design is necessary for sanitary-product changes, making the comparison inherently unequal by function, not favoritism. A second, sharper split was empirical: several posters said they personally never witnessed girls’ or boys’ restroom lines at school, directly questioning whether the survey’s premise reflects real conditions at all.
What’s missing from the thread is any reference to established “potty parity” research elsewhere, which shows women require measurably more time per restroom visit for physiological reasons — a factor that would explain unequal fixture ratios without invoking design bias, yet none of the posters raised it.
*This article is compiled and summarized from the 5ch (Breaking News+) thread「Girls’ Restrooms Are Scarce at School Too: Boys Get 1.4x More Toilets, Survey of 72 Major Cities and Wards Finds」.
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