I gacha toilet right ‘ere, pal!

Japan is certainly a mountainous country and a climber’s paradise. At least, it is until nature calls way out in nature. Sure, you could do as bears and the Pope do according to some rhetorical questions I’ve heard, but if everyone did that on the more popular mountains, it could quickly turn a pristine hiking course into an incredibly crappy one in every sense of the word.

Another solution would be to set up public toilets, or at the very least porta-potties, but those cost money to set up and maintain, and who’s going to pay for that? The mountains? They just sit around all day doing nothing except blowing up sometimes.

However, a company named Spring in Yamanashi Prefecture thinks they have the solution, and a very Japanese solution at that: gacha machines!

Let’s face it, everyone hates pay toilets on principle because nobody likes flushing money down the drain. Capsule machines, on the other hand, defy you not to put money in them, even if they’re full of the most useless stuff you can find, like photos of complete strangers or miniature red-light district signboards.

The Gacha Toilet works on this very simple logic by setting up both a capsule machine and porta-potty at key locations in Japanese mountains. By using the machine, you support the maintenance of the toilet, get a little something in return, and get to relieve yourself with a clear conscience.

The first Gacha Toilet has been set up in the Iwadonosan Park Municipal Parking Lot near Iwadonosan, a mountain in Otsuki, Yamanashi Prefecture famed for having one of the Twelve Beautiful Views of Mount Fuji. As such, it’s popular with climbers but had no public restrooms to speak of, until now!

It works on the honor system in that you don’t really need to buy something from the gacha machine in order to enter the porta-potty. However, those that do will be rewarded with either a button featuring one of the Twelve Beautiful Views of Mount Fuji, or an omamori lucky charm with one of four Otsuki sightseeing spots on them.

Both of these items are acrylic because they’ve been upcycled from all those acrylic partitions every restaurant and food court had installed during the COVID-19 pandemic.

If successful, we can expect to see Gacha Toilets in other remote locations across Japan combining the thrill of getting a random item with the thrill of using a public toilet. I guess you can enjoy the mountains too if you’re into that sort of thing.

Source, images: PR Times
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