By Michael Breen

The move from a boring apartment block, where everything works, to a modernized version of the traditional home was exciting.

There we were, in downtown Seoul, in a house that Japanese and Korean tourists stop to photograph on weekends. Two swallows arrived at dusk and perched all night on the crossbeams, apparently a sign of good luck. Inside, the fresh pine beams and clean white walls gave the feel of a holiday chalet. Half the house was semi-basement, cool enough for minimum air conditioner use. The kitchen was state-of-the-art.

Imagine your reporter's distress, then, when the landlady popped by to remind us, because we're foreigners, not to put toilet paper in the bowl. It should be put out with the regular garbage.

Come again? I've been here 27 years and never done that, I said.

"Well, that's what you have to do if you live in a 'hanok,'" she said, with a look that answered the puzzle of why she didn't live in a traditional house herself.

Out of sensitivity, I'm backing slowly into this theme to give readers time to finish their cornflakes. But now I need to explain something. That is that, in Korea, when wiping after a No. 2, most people do not flush the paper away. Instead, it goes in a basket, which never seems to have a lid, placed next to the commode for the purpose.

This is the case in most small and medium, and even some large, commercial buildings, and in houses. My landlady's jibe about having to do it in a hanok was an example of prejudice against traditional housing. In fact, not only is the stinky basket everywhere, but defecators who have grown up with the habit never quite shake their reluctance to flush paper away even when they move to posh new apartments. A show of hands revealed that 75 percent of my office staff employ the basket solution.

As I said, I have lived in Korea for a long time but I was not aware of this issue for the first few years. I had noticed the plastic basket and was also aware of a vague unclean smell in the toilet in my last office building. But I never gave it much thought until, one day, I found myself stranded without toilet paper, an experience that is only funny in movies. For the first time, I took an interest in the paper right there beside me in the basket. I somehow survived and never thought much about it again.

Until now. After the landlady's instruction, I wanted to know more about the origins of this unhygienic habit and started asking around.

Kim Hyung-do, the head of the sewage disposal department at Seoul's Jongro-gu Office, said there was no reason to worry about toilet paper in the bowl because it is designed to disintegrate quickly (unlike the newsprint which our grandparents used). I immediately thought the galaxy needs to know this liberating fact.

A plumber concurred, saying that the only thing to worry about is blocking the U-pipes behind the bowl, which, like shit, happens.

For a historical and more technical perspective, I turned to Peter Bartholomew, the expatriate expert in ancient Korean buildings who has been here since the mid-1960s. He said the issue is connected with the size of septic tanks. They're too small, most likely because in the old days human excrement was collected regularly for fertilizer. You just didn't need a big one.

``There is only one compartment in these small septic tanks," he said. ``In more modern tanks there are two or even three compartments separated by baffles which allow staged decomposition along with the toilet paper, thus ensuring the final effluent from the tank is almost totally decomposed liquid, devoid of any solids."

The collection trucks ― or ``honey dippers," as he called them ― prefer pure ``black water." But because local governments require the tanks to be pumped out every six or 12 months, they have to come around before the contents have completely turned to liquid. The solid materials such as toilet paper apparently cause problems with their pumps.

So, there you have it. Because the tank guys moan at the building owners, the entire country continues an unhygienic habit. It's time to stop it and put the toilet paper where it belongs.

Michael Breen is chairman of Insight Communications Consultants and exclusive partner of FD International. He can be reached at mike.breen@insightcomms.com.