Malaysia Bathrooms

At first it appeared to me that it was a tremendous productivity tool to help the home owner to clean the bathroom without retrieving buckets of water from the bathtub or redirecting water from the shower overhead.

But why were so many individual hoses needed in a community bathroom when a single centralized hose would clean all the stalls more efficiently no matter the sit-down type or the "hole-in-the-ground" type?

None of these satisfied my curiosity until I saw a miniature sprayer built into the back of a toilet fixture in a commercial building when I had my "aha" moment. There was a water faucet on the wall but no water hose in the stall. There was NO WAY one could get a bucket of water out of that little hole ....

Suddenly it became brutally clear to me that the hose with a sprayer wasn't design to clean the bathroom but used as a personal hygiene device. See the turning knob in the picture? If you had to get to the bottom of it for the truth, it was a bidet to clean the buttocks and the genitalia.

This was an upgraded version of a bidet with pulsating water and temperature control.

There were other fancier bidet which came in all sizes, shapes and colors. This modern version of the 'productivity tool' was found in most hotels in Malaysia.

This was a urinal that served the same purpose.

But more importantly, all these facilities conformed to the Islamic faith in Malaysia governing personal hygiene called "Qadaa' al-Haajah" where water was used to 'purify' or to remove uncleanliness from one's body. Other countries, cultures, religions or even indigenous people also had similar practices using water for ritual purification and cleansing purposes.