Superficially Japan is the most foreign, odd and complicated place this side of Jupiter’s third moon. Yet, strangely, every time I go there it’s like I’m being reunited with a long-lost twin brother.

Think about it. It’s an overcrowded island nation that in recent history has enjoyed great power. What’s more, the Japanese have a fondness for good manners, bureaucracy and - when the chips are down - great cruelty.

They drive on the correct side of the road. They have a royal family. And because they have built a society over thousands of years, they can tell where someone went to school, where they live and what their dreams and hopes are for the future simply by watching them hold a chopstick.

In the same way, we know everything about a person if we discover they have a set of serviette rings.

There’s more. We used to laugh when Clive James showed us those Japanese game shows in which contestants were made to eat slugs and go to work with their underpants full of stick insects. “How weird,” we thought. But then, just a few years later, Tara Palmer-Tomkinson was sitting up to her neck in a vat of maggots.

I’ve been terrified recently that we in Britain have been sliding towards the American system, with our malls and our enormous bottoms. I’d much rather we had continued to walk in step with the Japanese, who are now so civilised that they have a system on the roads where the bus driver lets the car go first and you are allowed to smoke pretty much everywhere. As I enjoyed a cigarette and a beer with a group of friends in a Tokyo bar last week I thought how much more wonderful Britain would be if we adopted a similar policy.

Perhaps because of this relaxed attitude, Japanese people can expect to live longer than anyone else on Earth. Like the French and the Icelanders, who also smoke a lot and eat well, they have a good chance of reaching 100. It’s only slaves to the American way who drop dead in a gym, aged six.

There is, however, one aspect of Japanese life that is neither similar to the system we have in Britain nor something we should covet: going to the lavatory.

This is a fairly standard procedure over much of the globe. Except in Germany, where you are invited to inspect your stools with a lollipop stick before flushing them away. Unfortunately, though, the Japanese have examined the simple water closet and decided that it could be improved with some electronics. The result, I’m afraid, is a disaster.

It’s why the Japanese economy is now in such a mess: all their top people and scientists are stuck in their bathrooms, unable to wipe their bottoms.

First of all the seat is warmed - and there is no way for the round-eye to know this, which means I had to sit there imagining the heat had come from the lorry driver who’d been the last person to use the motorway service-station cubicle. This is unnerving. Soon I became convinced that it was possible to catch encephalitis from the latent heat of a Japanese lorry driver’s bottom.

Wanting to get out of there as quickly as possible, I turned and discovered to my horror that the loo roll had been replaced with what can only be described as the Starship Enterprise’s dashboard. And it was all in Japanese.

The first button I pushed, with a trembly finger, made the seat get even warmer. Realising that unless I acted quickly I’d be cooked, I stabbed at another button - which made a gout of liquid nitrogen shoot up my bottom. So hurriedly, and in great pain, I turned a hopeful-looking knob that simply redirected the fountain into my scrotum.

In a state of some distress I pushed a slider control all the way down and immediately got a pretty good idea of what it might be like accidentally to impale yourself on the fuel rod from a nuclear power station. I was now in real trouble.

And I didn’t understand why. Who would want to steam-clean their nether regions? Who wants a lavatory seat that can reach the same temperature as a barbecue? And, conversely, who gets up in the morning and thinks: “I know, I’ll stop off at the Brue Boar services this morning and deep-freeze my testicles”?

Which brings me on to the next question. Why is it necessary to have directional control for the fountain of fire and ice? I can understand why a lady might need - and even enjoy - such a feature. But for chaps it’s jolly painful.

And then there’s the problem with the flush. The first button I pressed filled the cubicle with karaoke tunes. The second started the tap in the corner. It wasn’t till I got to the sub-menu in the eighth quadrant that I was treated to the sound of water being sucked away.

Unfortunately it was just the recording of a flush being played through the WC’s speaker system. Am I missing something here? I can think of no reason anyone might want to convince people in neighbouring cubicles that they are flushing the bog when in fact they are not. And why would you want to play this sound at a volume that could kill bats? Because, trust me, you can.

Finally I leant over the unit to see if there was a conventional handle, and somehow while doing this I made a jet of water squirt into my crotch. Which meant I eventually emerged from the cubicle looking as though I hadn’t bothered to lower my trousers. Everyone in the restaurant laughed at my misfortune. And once again I felt very much at home.

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