and the extremely difficult to access mechanism for moving anywhere from one to three small, perpetually damp pipes into position inside the bowl, themselves accessorized with numerous little hinges, cavities, crevices to collect and accumulate offal in effectively unclean-able (but mostly out-of-sight) recesses.

Although initially intrigued, after staying in Japan for a few weeks I came to despise those overcomplicated, ironically un-hygenic toilet systems - especially in public facilities, and tried to avoid using them as much as possible.

On the other hand I greatly preferred the old fashioned squat style setup, I would seem to be a lot more practical of a solution on a number of leven.

Are you making things up? The norm, if there's a bidet, is for it to be button controlled. Even a lot of public toilets have button controlled bidets at this point.

Some really old public parks will have squatters, and in the past these bathrooms would also not have had toilet paper (because the assumption is that you'd bring your own tissue paper with you - this is one of the reasons they hand out tissue papers with advertising). But nowadays basically all toilets have paper, and most have nice new bidets.