What makes you feel comfortable when you are in an airport? Is it the massive size of a modern terminal, less crowded security lines, convenient access to the city center or friendly airline staff at ticket counters?

The quality of washrooms does it for me. I find many washrooms at airports around the world are often unsatisfactory. Sometimes they’re small, unclean, with wet floors and smelly, as many of you have experienced. I remember, when I was traveling around exotic places in Eastern Europe some years ago, the toilet paper provided in an airport washroom was horrible. It was coarse and rough, not suitable at all for such a place. Yes, the quality of a washroom gives us an idea of how an airport, a city, or even a country grapples with its sanitation and economic challenges.Tokyo’s Haneda International Airport was ranked second in the Washroom Cleanliness category in the 2008 ranking of world airports announced on July 14 by research company Skytrax (London, U.K.). It was the only Japanese airport to rank in the category.

The ranking comes from the World Airport Awards, which have been ongoing since 1989. Surveys of

approximately 8.2 million passengers in 97 countries were taken over a span of ten months from August 2007 to May 2008. Over 190 airports were evaluated.

Haneda, the fourth-largest mega airport in the world according to number of passengers flown, is located just 30 minutes away from the center of Tokyo. It is currently expanding its operational capacity with the aim of “re-internationalization” and is set to be completed in 2010. We should be proud of the respected award as proof of Japanese hospitality, diligence and public health. So, next time you are in Haneda Airport, try the washrooms and enjoy their cleanliness so you can feel at ease.

 K. Yamamoto, azure connexion, LLC

azure connexion, LLC provides quality marketing solutions in the form of multilingual content management and language services. Being specialized in the international airline and travel industry, it has been engaged with various promotional projects, translation in major language pairs, website localization, multi-language writing/editing, and media content productions for TV, radio and Internet media.

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