Ok, I don’t want to seem fixated on the subject of bathrooms here, but I saw signs on the outsides of a lot of restaurants in Seoul which resembled this one. I think the text under the sign (click on the picture for a larger version) says something like, “The restrooms in our establishment are open for the benefit of the public.” (at least that is what I can make out, with the help of my new EW-K3000 electronic dictionary)
This may not seem like a big deal, but if that is what these signs mean, that is very cool! Japan, Norway, the US, most of the places I have visited always have obnoxious signs that say things like, “The restrooms here are only available for use by our customers.” That doesn’t stop every drunk on a late night in Stavanger from using the bathroom at MacDonalds (when I lived there, McDs was open really late on weekends) but still! In Stavanger, and many places I can remember visiting in Holland, Germany, and China you have to pay a fee to get into many bathrooms. Japanese train stations usually put bathrooms on the inside, where only ticketed passengers can get too them.
It may not sound like much but for traveling bums like me on a shoestring budget and those who like to walk around big cities and explore, public trash cans (see my earlier entry) and publicly accessible bathrooms go a long way towards making me happy. I should note, however, that in Japan, both of these are pretty much provided by the ubiquitous convenience store.