Peeing one’s pants is a problem that knows no borders. Well except for the parts of the world that don’t wear pants at least. Nevertheless, it affects all races, religions, genders, and ages.

However, when a video of Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos apparently releasing urine into his unfortunately brightly colored slacks hit YouTube, it was like no one had ever seen such a thing before. Granted it was relatively rare coming from a world leader, but they pee their pants one leg at a time just like the rest of us.

And yet this video has spread across the globe like so much discharged fluid into a cotton polyester blend, and many people’s reactions to it were equally uncomfortable once more was understood about the man – Japan being no exception.

Taking the video at face value it’s easy to make a wide variety of assumptions. Japanese websites, for example, have run posts titled “President of Colombia has incontinence during speech” and accused him of being “over-excited about the upcoming election.”

Here are a selection of comments from Japanese netizens.

“Hahaha”
“I don’t think he’ll win the presidency after this.”
“I wonder if I’ll live long enough to pee myself like that.”
“When you hit old age, all sort of stuff happens like peeing yourself without noticing. Lol It’s just too bad it’s exposed to the world like that. Lol”
“Peeing President”
“I remember a video where a woman wearing white pants did diarrhea all over herself… I’m gonna go watch that again.”
“When that happens with dogs we call it ureshon [happy pee].”
“I wonder if I’ll live long enough to leak urine like that.”
“It looks like he has an enlarged prostate… Or he’s drunk.”
“There is a possibility it was diarrhea, but given his age it was probably due to an enlarged prostate. Urine leakage from an enlarged prostate is a common problem for guys and it can’t be helped unless by surgery. For women it’s even worse than men. Half of women over 40 are said to have urine leakage.”

As time went by commenters were starting to get close to the mark. While it was nice to see the topic of enlarged prostates and incontinence get discussed in a relatively respectable manner, this was most likely not President Santos’ problem.

In 2012, a small cancerous tumor was found in Santos’ prostate. Since he was regularly checked and diagnosed early a surgical team at Santa Fe Hospital in Bogota was able to successfully remove it and he was later deemed cancer free. So while we can probably attribute this to a side effect of the prostate surgery Santos underwent, some might argue that he should have been better prepared with some diapers or darker slacks at the very least.

I disagree, however, for a guy recovering from cancer while serving as president and campaigning for reelection that seems like a fairly reasonable oversight. I admittedly know next to nothing about the politics of Colombia but if everything else about Santos is on the level then I’d be proud to have a leader like him who puts his service to the country higher on his list of priorities than his own leaky plumbing.

Source: Zaeega (Japanese), El Espectador, El Tiempo (Spanish)
Video: YouTube – Didisupergirl