Whatever works.
I am DYING.
My child was not lured into toilet training via anything at ALL that I tried. She had the concept mentally way before we ever got there with it physically. Not that I didn't have the kiddy potty out at 18 months, per instructions by her pediatrician... I did. We have no less than 10 different attempts at potty training, trying rewards, trying peer pressure, trying mystique, trying laissez-faire, trying everything POSITIVE we could conjure up, all met with miserable results. Until, one day, she decided she didn't want a diaper anymore, and we graduated to underwear with no pomp and circumstance at all.
But the videos? Freakin' hilarious. Especially Buddhapotty.
We're not near toilet training yet, but I'm bookmarking this post for when we do.
Everything is better with jazz hands.
I love Toire-sama. I nearly died the first time I saw it on TV in Tokyo.
[http://floatingworld.typepad.com/
floating_world_views/2005/07/toilet_tv.html]
The shops there sell toilet seat covers so you can have a Toire-sama of your very own.
The Japanese, they really are different than us.
we wave bye-bye to our pee-pee and poopie, too. i liked how the poop floated heads up right before it went down. see how youtube is saving the world one person at a time?
we've had the potty sitting in the bathroom for a month now, with some interest. pnut likes to sit on it fully clothed, or throw things in it that she finds in our drawers. so far her favorite thing about the "mystique of the bathroom" is watching her dad take a whiz. god bless her, cause the magic of my husbands bodily functions ran out a long time ago for me. there's only so many times i will fall for "hey, come in here, i wanna show you something!" sigh.
congrats, juney (and mama and dada), on the potty training!
Those look so utterly cool, I can't wait to watch them all even though potty training is long over at my house.
You guys are so lucky to be parents in the age of YouTube. I can't imagine the watch-lists that you would be put on trying to hunt down a rotation of "Japanese toilet training, Charlie Chaplin, and psychedelic 70s shorts."
hey awesome PR for us crazy Mormons! high five! 
p.s. did you ever get to put her on the Oakland one?! SO worth a re-visit to CA, you might appreciate the style of that one a little more.
That is fucking hilarious!!!!! There is no other way to describe the videso. Love them. And love thinking of you singing the songs to Juniper.
Umm...what's a squatter toilet?
We're almost there. Actually, we probably should be but I am a lazy mother and so I insist that he's not ready. But he might be. I don't know. I will definitely have him check these out and see if it helps any.
He loved Cockaboody and Moonbird and would request them by name. So if your little log thingy picked up anyone in Italy on your site for hours on end that was us.
thank you thank you. this post made my week! And I am in agreement with Juniper-chan, I don't like the end of that clip either!
The scariest part of it to me is the squatter toilet. How do the elderly and infirm do it? Are there options for them? Do they have to lean on it and, God forbid, touch it with their hands? I've never been so grateful for toilet engineers.
During the constipation song, when the toilet it saying 'It will come out eventually,' I fought the urge to yell out, 'Yeah, when your mom shoves a glycerin suppository up your ass!'
So. Funny.
"Ever since, Juniper has considered the porcelain shrine in our bathroom the site of an important rite of passage after which you get to wear special underwear (so, not unlike the Mormon temple)."
OMG, I think I may have peed myself a little laughing at this.
My oldest decided one day that she wanted to pee standing up "like daddy" that one's fun to explain!
Your kid is a total riot. I've been reading for a few weeks now and love your site. Great stuff; these are the anecdotes parenting is about.
my 2 year old (not potty trained yet) (and no interest either) loved these. he kept saying "i watch kitty cat poop again mama?" the grunting was so authentic too. wow.
There is great timing in your post for my household. I was afraid that we had presented the potty too early at 19 months when she enjoyed pretending that the removable cup was a cup to drink pretend coffee and that the base unit was a good place to take pretend baths, but the last 2 days my daughter has been telling me poopie and pee pee either just before or after an event and she has had great interest in saying bye to the poopie watching it disapper as we flush it down the toilet. This morning, I got her to the potty a little too late to catch the full pee pee, but she still peed a tiny bit in the little yellow cup and I am unbelievably proud. I will use these videos with her in the hopes that now is really the time to move past diapers! Thanks!
Loved the comment on the Mormon church. As a (non LDS) refugee from BYU, I can completely relate!
For us older folk: do the Japanese have any videos to help with incontinence?
But I can tell you this. After considering all the philosophies of potty training with kid#1, it was too much bother with the other two and they just got there without any fuss at all when the time was right.
You never know how interesting the pottie is until you have a baby!! I have all kind of pottie, and poopie songs stored away in my brain. Now I have to pull them out because we have a grandchild... Can't wait!
Alas....videos like this abound in Japan, but we still had a hard time training our middle child (now 10) when she was a baby over there.
Perhaps because Japanese was her first language, she was immune to its spell?
And if you were impressed by the true-to-life grunting sound effects in the poop video, I recommend you check out Japanese animated porn, for a truly surreal, creepy experience.
And to the commenters above who asked about "squatters," most Japanese people have stronger thigh muscles than us pampered Westerners -- but yes, there's a variety of special attachments that can be affixed to Japanese-style toilets to make them easier for the elderly/infirm to use.
Do you guys realize that you have McDONALDS ads on your site? Crazyness.
I've said it before and I'll it again - Public Service Award for Contributions to The Art and Science of Parenting.
I'm nominating you.
For every event (new skill) in childhood I have the same, simultaneous reaction: do nothing!/foster achievement!
The first--do nothing--comes from you know laziness and this sense that engagement and living regular life will inevitabley usher in the next event, including use of the potty.
The latter comes from feeling like parenting is a skill that actually requires effort and in many cases research.
The result is that my poor child goes from a situation of weeks of me barely mentioning in passing that her potty is an option to whole days of intense excitement about the POTTY! and UNDERWEAR! and cool new cartoon MOVIES! in other languages! Sheesh.
At one point, I'm told, my mother refused to change my diapers, and I retaliated by changing them myself.
Then they mentioned offhand one day that, gosh, how sad it will be, Sophie will never have a third birthday party because she's not potty trained.
Worked like a charm.
Fabulous blog, by the way. How hard do we have to poke you two for a new mix of SweetJuniper! Tunes?
ohman, i think i love you.
and i love the japanese potty cartoons too.
just in time for my boytoddlerchild who is way to aware of his pooping to be doing it in a diaper. but that's just my opinion.
I have just started reading your blog, but introduced these videos to my nearly three-and-a-half year old boy... he has watched them, spellbound, multiple times over this last week. If this is what we needed all along, I owe you a bottle of champagne or something! What I wouldn't give to get the potty-training over and done with.
check it out:
http://ternsem.blogspot.com/
korea loves to poop too.
I showed these to my brothers Japanese girlfriend. She went into hysterics as she hasn't seen them since she was a girl. Apparently the squatty potty speaks in an older style dialect (very formal) as it's a much older model than the other toilet. The washing machine is always making puns on octopii and the number 8 as well ("Sentako" is a combination of "sentaku," which means laundry, and "tako," which means octopus. "Hacchan" is a combination of "hachi," which mean "eight," and "chan," which is a diminutive suffix). Anyways, I think this series needs to be translated as it seems to work in the potty training department.
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