With well-lit clean toilets, my bathroom experience at Waseda is the best of all the schools I have attended. Gone are the days of scary, dark toilets fraught with cobwebs by the school playground. Furthermore, the stalls go from floor to ceiling so there is no need to worry about whether the person next door is wondering about your mismatched socks.
Exploring Waseda through its toilets may seem somewhat frivolous, but toilets are a significant piece of the foundation supporting all the people who use Waseda’s facilities. Just as the cafeteria and other related services supply the school with nutritious food, toilets facilitate a healthy environment. For example, washing hands is a cheap, easy and effective way to prevent disease.
Building 8
Waseda University has several campuses. The Waseda Campus is its main one, located five minutes on foot from Waseda Station. Its buildings are numbered and range from Building 1 to Building 29. With 2 floors below ground and 12 floors above, Building 8 is home of the School of Law. Located on the right hand side of the Shigenobu Okuma statue and adjacent to the South Gate (南門), it is convenient for people coming from Waseda Station. It was completed in 2005 and is one of the few buildings with escalators.
Lounges
One of my favorite lounges in Waseda is right here! It features beautiful high latticed windows. It is usually full of law students reviewing lecture notes with their classmates.
The lounge is on the third floor and overlooks a road that passes many other academic buildings.
There is also a student lounge that doubles as an eat-in area run by the University Co-op (生協 Seikyo). Here, you can buy lunch without leaving the building. You may want to note that it gets very crowded during lunch, like most places that sell food on campus.
Toilets
Building 8 has a variety of toilets with different layouts. Generally, there is one on each floor.
I chose one on the basement floor for its eye-catching yellow stall doors, white tiles and gray flooring.
The toilet is stocked with the standard bin for menstrual hygiene products, toilet paper, two types of bidets and Otohime (音姫), or “sound princess” that masks any sound you make in there.