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The story
A survey of school bathrooms across 74 cities and wards nationwide by the Asahi Shimbun found that boys’ restrooms have 1.4 times as many urinals as girls’ restrooms have stalls. The investigation was sparked by a female student’s complaint that “recess ends up being nothing but standing in the bathroom line.” On 5ch, the observation that “the boys’ room is empty” set off a wide-ranging thread covering the causes of the congestion, phone use eating up stall time, and preferences for squat versus Western-style toilets.
Published 8/26 (Wed) 7:02 AM
withnews by Asahi Shimbun
Long lines at women’s restrooms have become a social issue, driven by the gender gap in the number of toilets available. The Asahi Shimbun first covered the issue in an article in January 2025. Since then, we’ve heard from many quarters requests to “look into school restrooms too,” so between May and July 2026 we surveyed a total of 74 municipalities — government-designated cities, prefectural capitals, and Tokyo’s 23 wards. 72 of them responded, and our analysis of a combined 624,011 toilets found that boys’ restrooms have 1.4 times as many units as girls’ restrooms. (Asahi Shimbun reporter Tomoko Yamashita)
Source: news.yahoo.co.jp / Original article here
What people said
and line up urinals to match the men's room.
If you're complaining the numbers are unequal, you'd have to accept this as a solution too, right?
If a guy uses a stall, he gets nicknamed "Poop Man," so we held it in desperately until we got home.
They should make all men's toilets stalls too.
That would cut the number down to match the women's side,
and everyone would be happy, problem solved.
Wasn't there an Abe Kobo short story with a factory foreman nicknamed "Stopwatch"?
Not just that urinals are hard to use — it's also more prone to infections and leakage. It's hard to see the upside of that design.
There's no real reason.
Every part of the human body was just slapped together haphazardly.
Same here.
There's probably a faction that wants it to look that way.
So the fix for the women's room is to rip out the partitions and go "nihao-style" (open squat toilets in a row, like some Chinese public restrooms) to fit more in — problem solved lol
Plus girls supposedly go to the bathroom in pairs holding hands, which eats up even more time.
Guys don't do the buddy-bathroom-trip thing.
I heard from a girl that the Showa-era version of that (the buddy system) was actually meant to guard against perverts.
Elementary schoolers don't wear makeup, and they can't bring phones to school either, you know.
They stand there messing with their wet hands in their hair while staring in the mirror, forever.
And this despite the falling birth rate.
Probably because, unlike the old days, people spend a lot longer in the stall looking at their phones.
I never saw lines like this 20 years ago.
Try 30 years ago — women's bathrooms already had lines back then.
There was even a stir about middle-aged women sneaking into the men's room to use a stall because the women's side was too crowded,
and that's old news by now.
It stops bothering you around college age, but what even is that about?
Back in middle school I could never go before leaving home, so I always ended up doing it at school, and it became a running joke: "Pooping again? lol"
By that point I'd just stopped caring.
Female VTubers pee faster than I do, even.
Lol
Yeah, they're back in a flash.
And if it does take a while and you think "oh, must be a poop," turns out they went and made instant noodles instead.
Bruh, it's a woman lolololol
Standing in line is just being soft
Squat toilets have a bad reputation, though.
Plenty of students cross a school off their list just because it has squat toilets.
Correspondingly, schools that renovate to Western-style toilets see higher application rates.
It's unpopular, so people probably just finish quickly and get out.
Though squat toilets are actually more hygienic since you don't touch anything with your butt.
What are they even doing in there?
With squat toilets you can't sit down, so it wouldn't take long.
Isn't it slow because they're sitting there checking their phones?
Go ask your girlfriend or wife.
Background and Key Points
The survey sits on top of a broader push in Japan to fix what’s been dubbed the “women’s toilet line” problem — the Asahi Shimbun’s January 2025 piece first framed unequal restroom wait times as a gender-equity issue in public facilities, and this follow-up applies the same lens to schools. The 74 municipalities surveyed are Japan’s designated cities (seirei shitei toshi, large cities with prefecture-level administrative powers), prefectural capitals, and Tokyo’s 23 special wards — together a sample skewed toward Japan’s biggest urban school districts, not rural areas. Of the 72 that responded, tallying 624,011 fixtures nationwide, boys’ facilities came out 1.4 times larger in unit count.
The thread’s actual fault line isn’t over whether girls wait longer — nobody disputes that — but over cause: is the gap structural (urinals need far less floor space and plumbing per unit than an enclosed stall, so any given square footage naturally yields more male fixtures) or behavioral (phone use, grooming, or the “buddy system” of pairing up for restroom trips, historically a safety habit against harassment rather than idle chatting)?
What the thread misses is that raw fixture counts don’t map cleanly onto capacity, since a stall and a urinal occupy very different amounts of space — so equalizing “unit numbers” between the sexes, as some posters jokingly propose, wouldn’t equalize actual floor area or renovation cost. Also unaddressed: Japan’s school toilets still run a meaningful share of washiki (squat-style) units, a leftover from pre-1990s construction standards that many districts are only now budgeting to replace with yoshiki (Western-style) fixtures.
*This article is compiled from excerpts and a summary of the 5ch (Breaking News Plus) thread “【🚻】Girls’ School Bathrooms Have Lines Too — “Recess Ends Up Being Nothing But Standing in Line” — Boys’ Urinals Outnumber Them 1.4-to-1… How the Survey Started“.
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