Going to the toilet used to be a public activity. Will Japan’s see-through stalls take us back to the days before the S-bend brought lavatories indoors?

At the Happiness and Prosperity service station in the rural reaches of Sichuan province, I prepared to face the public toilet. We had been driving for hours, and my need was urgent, but I still hesitated. Not because the service station was unclean: the restaurant was pristine, and the food cheap and fabulous. It was because of the doors. There wouldn’t be any.

I asked my translator if there was an etiquette. Where should I look? What is considered rude? I had no idea, because this was turning all my concepts of public and private upside down. I knew that some schools and institutions in the western world had doorless toilets, the better to foster compliance or – in the case of the military – to extract individuality. But I grew up in a culture that provided privacy abundantly and without question. I like doors. At the Happiness and Prosperity service station, I knew I would miss them. So how did I do it? By studiously not looking at the line of women who had graciously – or pruriently – let me go first, and by building doors in my mind.