Why do some people feel a sudden urge for the toilet in bookshops?
In 1985 a 29-year-old Tokyo woman wrote to a Japanese book magazine with an odd confession: for two or three years, every visit to a bookstore had sent her hunting for a toilet. The editors printed it as a joke. Then letters poured in from readers with the same problem, and Japan gave it her name.
Mariko Aoki's short letter appeared in the magazine Hon no Zasshi in February 1985. The chief editor, Makoto Shiina, ran it because he found it amusing, but the flood of similar reports led to a 14-page feature in the next issue, promoted on the cover as the phenomenon shaking the bookstore industry. Those pages produced no answer, yet they spread the name across Japan. Aoki has since said she does not mind her name being used.
Nobody knows the cause. Suggestions include a laxative effect from the smell of paper or ink, a learned link with reading on the toilet at home, and the stooped posture of browsing. Some writers blame nervous tension at facing so much information on the shelves, while some book lovers propose the opposite: that being surrounded by thousands of lovely books relaxes them completely, bowels included. The evidence for every theory is weak, and doctors do not treat it as a medical condition.
It was not entirely new. Hints of a link between bookshops and bowels appear in Japanese fiction as early as 1957, and a man from Nara described the same experience in the magazine two months before Aoki, attracting no notice. Her account caught on, the publisher suspected, partly because an ordinary young woman had been frank about such a delicate subject. Television tests in the late 1990s helped it become accepted as real, and the comedian Jerry Seinfeld joked in 1993 that bookstores should add bathrooms.
Hard numbers are scarce. One report guesses it affects between one person in ten and one in twenty, and an online poll of young working women found 40 of 150 said yes. A tiny study suggested women report it two to four times as often as men. By 2012 it had become quiz-show material: asked for its name on Japanese television, 10 of 20 contestants got it right.
Source: Mariko Aoki phenomenon
