Unko: Japan’s weird obsession with poop-themed stuff
Japan’s a country where you can experience a singing, light-up toilet… and squat over a hole in the ground… in the same day. A place where kids use poop to learn basic language skills, but grown-ass adults still hide in the toilet cubicle until the other person leaves.
This love-hate relationship with bathrooms has somehow led to a huge variety of poop-themed variety goods.
Unko Kanji Drills
Learn kanji with toilet humour. The runaway success story from 2017 is the Unko Kanji Drills set of basic kanji writing textbooks. Every kanji’s more memorable, thanks to the easy writing instructions… and the poop-themed example sentences.
Unko Kanji now has Unko-sensei merch, a board game, an epic ‘Unko Math Drills’ version, a way easier spin-off called Unko Katakana Drills, a range of curry for kids, and official Kanto-only toilet paper.
Unko-sensei’s gonna take over the world. Hiragana Drills have to be next, and after that? Who knows.
Emoji poop goods
Go on and give a kawaii poop cushion a big hug. Shut your eyes, ignore the weird faces on each poop, and don’t think too hard about the squishy-ness or texture either.
When you’re ready, you can move on to the full body poopmoji costume, slippers and hat, the blow-up water floats, and the remote-controlled mini ‘pile driver’ poop car. If you dare.
It’s almost scary how many poop items there are. Half scary, and half kinda weirdly interesting. Scrolling through them all at least passes the time on a bathroom break…
Poop that sticks to the walls
Fling these little poops, and they’ll make a ‘clean’ landing on most surfaces.
‘Flying unkos’ are coated in a sticky gum-like finish, peeling back off the wall nice and easy. Some come with a slingshot, to help your aim. Wouldn’t want to throw your crap the wrong way now.
As poop-themed toys go, they’re the most tacky (duh, no kidding). We’ve seen light-up poops, giant poops that grow when you get them wet, and a poop-shaped swimming pool float chair, but the flying ones win. A poop in the pool has less real-life tackiness than sticky ones.
Toilet-shaped curry bowls
We hope you’ve got a decent appetite. It’s enough to put weaker people off their lunch.
These bowls are made to look like Japan’s squat toilets, mostly found in public places and super old apartments. And we don’t need to explain to you what curry can remind you of, do we?
In some ways, the design’s kinda clever – that hood over the top’s gonna keep your dinner warm. It’s the kind of random variety item you’d find at a place like Village Vanguard. Around the corner from the weird mugs, and next to the towels that look like bacon slices.
Using a toilet bowl to taste test that Unko Kanji Drills curry we talked about earlier’s a great idea.
Poop soap and bath bombs
Yeah, they’re sometimes brown. Yeah, sometimes the bath bombs turn the water brown too. You can maybe find bath poops in other rainbow colours, same as with the poop squishies and poop erasers.
Make a list of ‘things you want to see in your bathroom’, and poop isn’t gonna be there. (Unless… nope, never mind. Don’t wanna know.) They make real nice embarrassing gag gifts for Secret Santa exchanges, or for easily offended aunts and uncles to unwrap.
In an epic move, some poop bath bombs smell like… roses. As for the soap? It’s got the scent of Japanese tea.
Golden poop
Believe it or not, as soon as you spraypaint a poop golden it turns lucky.
Wear your gold poop with pride, as a hat, bracelet charm, or keyring. Good fortune and wealth comes to those brave enough. It’s gotta be about money – if you’re looking for love, maybe wear something people don’t naturally stay a mile away from.
And remember to take it seriously, or the luck won’t work. While browsing gold poop items to research this post, we found a tiny 18-karat gold poop worth 24,000 yen. Flush that by accident, and you’re cursed for the rest of your life.
DEJAPAN – the Japan proxy that gives a crap
That’s right. We give you the crap-themed goods from Japanese websites, because we care.
And if you’ve ever got questions about an item, or about how Japan proxy shopping services work, you can dump those on us too.
