For those who don't know, the title means "pee and poop".
I have to admit, this article has been sitting in my drafts box for a month or so, and I'm not sure of the original intent motivating it. I think, "pee and poop" is a good subject for discussion in any society, but perhaps most especially in Japan.
Don't worry, I won't veer into that element of culture, but I might start with a photo you often see in my neighborhood:
It's a picture of a girl walking a dog and a piece of poop. I laugh every time I see it: it's cute, and poop shouldn't be cute! The idea, of course, is that if you are walking a dog you are also responsible for its leavings. In the less graphic US, signs say this but don't picture it, but in Japan it seems almost every sign must include a graphic depiction, and poop is no different.
I should point out that poop is always depicted this way, as a spiral that tapers off at the end. One of the lessons at my school has an anaconda coiled in such a way as to bring this to mind, and I wonder how many English "teachers" have suffered through their students pointing at the anaconda and saying "unchi" over and over again without knowing what the little buggers meant. I can only imagine it is an intentional joke on the part of the creators of the textbooks. I knew what the kids meant (helped by Crayon Shinchan, who I'll discuss later), so I just laughed with them, and they spent the last lesson of that section drawing ever more suggestive drawings of coiled anacondas, mostly disregarding the other Amazon rain forest animals we were studying.