Hacker News Reader

Comment by laurieg | Hacker News Reader

This seems remarkably close to a Japanese "unit bath" bathroom. The entire room drains into a drain in the floor so you can use the shower head to clean it. It's small, with a tub, sink and toilet. The tap (faucet) for the sink also fills the bathtub.

To see images try an image search for 3点ユニットバス

View on HN

These look almost like standard Central European bathrooms. Except for the floor drain which when it happens is usually in the middle of the shower with the whole floor slanted towards it.

I really liked those when we were in Japan! Most hotels/hostels and even some flats you can rent have them. Always was super clean an convenient.

Totally incomparable to similar accommodations here in Europe where the traditional tiled bathrooms with shower box almost always have a puddle of water on the floor as well as some mold and dirt in the nooks and crannies.

I think I saw something similar in Korea and never liked it since you get your socks wet whenever you need to step into bathroom for even a second.

> Japanese "unit bath" bathroom

This is pretty much how bathroom-toilets in Singaporean public housing are designed; the entire floor is designed to 'get wet', and all drains away into a single culvert.

When traveling to Japan, we had a bathroom like this. We filled the bathtub with water to wash the kids. When we drained it, water came out of the floor drain and we were afraid it would overflow into the hallway. Works well in theory but in practice we found some flaws.

This would happen if something clogged the drain pipe after the intersection of the bathtub drain and floor drain, so that going up the floor drain became the easiest path. Someone before you may have thrown away something that clogged the pipe, but sometimes very hard water, a lot of time and no maintenance can also create limestone deposits that effectively shrink the pipe.

I liked the idea of many space-optimized furniture solutions in Japan. The unit bathrooms I encountered felt very cramped and wet with the toilet getting in the way when drying. I did like the half tub / shower combo and I love the toilets with sinks for reservoirs though.

Similarly in Scandinavia. My bathroom in Norway has a solid waterproof floor and a drain. The floor material extends 10 cm up the walls. The bath can overflow without flooding the house.

> 3点

I understood that visually as a butt being cleaned by a shower head sized bidet nozzle.

In Chinese it's dian3, which is used as a time indicator (i.e. analogous to "o'clock"), and also part of dian3 xin2 (meaning snack, dim sum is the more common form in English but it comes from Cantonese). I'm not sure what it means in this context but this is just to say the pictographic analogy likely doesn't work because it probably is some unit here and not actually referring to the bath itself. That comes from the katakana which reads "Unit bath"

点 means 'point', or 'spot', 'speck', 'tiny thing' etc... The "o'clock" meaning is a derivative, colloquial use of the word 'point'. So here it simply means 3-point, eg "3-point system".

I think the meaning is "3-point" as in there being a bathtub, sink, and toilet.

But "showerhead" is certainly an apt interpretation of that character for someone who doesn't know the language.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com