Nothing reflects the balance of power between the sexes quite like toilet politics.
In Japan, the job of toilet cleaning has generally fallen to the matriarch of the house. Little has changed there, it seems. What has changed is that many of those women are now asking their husbands to sit down when they urinate, and their new-age men are only too happy to oblige.
A well-publicized 2007 survey by electonics and toilet-seat-maker Panasonic suggested that 51 percent of Japanese men betwen the ages of 30 and 60 now pee sitting down. That figure was up from 15 percent in 1999, and from 30 percent in 2004. (The survey will probably be repeated next year, but for the moment the 2007 figures are the most recent.)