August 24, 2016
“The flush toilet is a curious object. It is the default method of excreta disposal in most of the industrialized, technologically advanced world. It was invented either five hundred or two thousand years ago, depending on opinion. Yet in its essential workings, this everyday banal object hasn’t changed much since Sir John Harington, godson of Queen Elizabeth I, thought his godmother might like something that flushed away her excreta, and devised the Ajax, a play on the Elizabethan word jakes, meaning privy.”
August 24, 2016
“In engineering terms, the best invention was the siphonic flush, which pulls the water out of the bowl and into the pipe. For the user, the S-bend was the godsend, because the water that rested in the bend created a seal that prevented odor from emerging from the pipe. At the height of Victorian invention, when toilets were their most ornate and decorated with the prettiest pottery, patents for siphonic flushes, for example, were being requested at the rate of two dozen or so a year.”
August 24, 2016
“The toilet, by contrast, remains adequate and nothing more, though readers of Focus magazine once voted it the best invention in history (over fire and the wheel). Compared to other items that are considered necessities—car, telephone, television—the toilet is rarely upgraded voluntarily. Marketers call it a “distress purchase” because it is only replaced when necessary.”
August 24, 2016
“In a tiny bar in Tokyo’s Golden Gai district, across the alley from Quentin Tarantino’s favorite bar, I’m having a conversation with the owner, a hefty, cheery girl from Hiroshima. She has asked what I’m doing here, and I have answered. “Oh! That’s so interesting!” Within five minutes, the entire bar—it holds seven bar stools and discretion is pointless—is discussing with great vigor the merits of Japan’s two leading toilet brands. TOTO washes better. Yes, but Inax dries better. It’s all a question of positioning. My companion, a genteel young woman who runs an art gallery, is amused. They are taking it totally seriously, she says. They are genuinely trying to help you. It’s nice.”
August 24, 2016
“Japan makes the most advanced, remarkable toilets in the world. Japanese toilets can, variously, check your blood pressure, play music, wash and dry your anus and “front parts” by means of an in-toilet nozzle that sprays water and warm air, suck smelly ions from the air, switch on a light for you as you stumble into the bathroom at night, put the seat lid down for you (a function known as the “marriage-saver”), and flush away your excreta without requiring anything as old-fashioned as a tank. These devices are known as high-function toilets, but even the lowliest high-function toilet will have as standard an in-built bidet system, a heated seat, and some form of nifty control panel.”
August 24, 2016
“first-time travelers to Japan have for years told a similar tale. Between being befuddled by used underwear-vending machines and unidentifiable sushi, they will have an encounter that proceeds like this: foreigner goes to bathroom and finds a receptacle with a high-tech control panel containing many buttons with peculiar symbols on them, and a strange nozzle in the bowl. Foreigner doesn’t speak Japanese and doesn’t understand the symbols, or the English translations that are sometimes provided. Does that button release a mechanical tampon grab or a flush? What, please, is a “front bottom”? Foreigner finishes business, looks in vain for a conventional flush handle, and then—also in vain—for which button controls the flush. ”
August 24, 2016
“ In modern Japan, the Washlet is as unremarkable and loved and taken for granted as the Band-Aid. Since 1980, TOTO, Japan’s biggest and oldest toilet manufacturer, has sold 20 million Washlets to a nation of 160 million people. According to census figures, more Japanese households now have a Washlet than a computer. They are so standard, some Japanese schoolchildren refuse to use anything else.”
August 24, 2016
“It is easy for anyone who has not used a Washlet to dismiss it as yet another product of Japanese eccentricity. Robo-toilets.”
August 24, 2016
“Two things interest me about the Japanese toilet revolution: that it happened, and that it has strikingly failed to spread.”
August 24, 2016
“TOTO—the name comes from a contraction of the Japanese words for “Asian porcelain”—ranks among the world’s top three biggest plumbing manufacturers. In 2006, its net sales were $4.2 billion. It has 20,000 employees, two-thirds of Japan’s bathroom market, seven factories in Japan, and a presence in sixteen countries. With the Washlet, TOTO has given the Japanese language a new word, and the Japanese people a new way of going to the toilet. It is a phenomenon.”
August 24, 2016
“But the toilet industry in Japan is a highly competitive business, and the top three—TOTO, Inax, and Matsushita—keep their secrets close. My requests to visit TOTO’s product development laboratories were politely refused.”
August 24, 2016
“She says TOTO is a good employer, though I’m disappointed to discover that rumors of certain employee perks are unfounded. They do not get free toilets.”
August 24, 2016
“ The world’s biggest toilet manufacturer was founded in 1917, when a man called Kazuchika Okura, then working for a ceramics company, thought it might be a good idea to manufacture toilet bowls. It was not the most obvious business plan. As Asuka puts it, “back then, the sanitation environment was terrible here in Japan. We only had wooden toilet bowls.” In truth, they didn’t have toilet bowls at all, because squatting toilets didn’t have any. Nonetheless, according to the official TOTO history—as told in a comic strip that Asuka gives me, this being manga-mad Japan—Mr. Okura expressed his desire, in somewhat stilted English, to “research how to mass-produce sanitary-ware, which are large ceramic items.”
August 24, 2016
“American forces stationed in Japan, accustomed to flush toilets at home, pushed for the same to be installed in the nation they were occupying. TOTO’s toilet bowls sold increasingly over the next forty years, and by 1977, more Japanese were sitting than squatting. This cultural change was not without difficulties. ”
August 24, 2016
“The Western style is the same as sitting on a chair. I had a terror that if I got used to it, I might excrete whenever I was sitting on a chair anywhere, even at a lesson or at mealtimes.”
August 24, 2016
“The new ceramic sitting toilet had other disadvantages. Visiting an outhouse during Japan’s freezing winters can never have been pleasant, but at least with a squat pan there was no contact between skin and cold ”
August 24, 2016
“The new style changed that. Now, flesh had to sit on icy ceramic for several months of the year, a situation worsened by a national resistance to central heating that persists today. A homegrown solution was devised by sliding socks onto the seat, but this technique only worked on old horseshoe-shaped seats, which were becoming less common.”
August 24, 2016
“First, there was the bidet issue. In toilet customs, the world divides, roughly speaking, into wet (flush) or dry (no flush). In anal-cleansing terms, it’s paper or water, and, as with driving habits, cultures rarely switch. India and Pakistan have a water culture, so that no visit to the bathroom is possible without a lota (small jug or cup) of water to cleanse with after defecation. Alexander Kira writes that nineteenth-century Hindus refused to believe Europeans cleaned themselves with paper “and thought the story a vicious libel.”
August 24, 2016
“Keeping clean and unpolluted is one of the four affirmations of Shintoism. Stepping unwashed into a bath, as Westerners do, is unthinkable to the Japanese, where a tradition of bathing communally in cedar-wood baths functions on the assumption that everyone in the bath is already clean.”
August 24, 2016
“Instead, the average Japanese toilet—especially the public variety—was known as the four K’s. It was kiken (dangerous), kitanai (dirty), kurai (dark), and kasai (stinky). Consequently, it was neither talked about nor acknowledged. This desire for concealing anything to do with defecatory practice surfaces in the common proverb Kusaimono ni futa wo suru (Keep a lid on stinky things); in the existence of Etiquette, a pill that claims to reduce odorous compounds present in excreta and is marketed to “people minding excrement smell”; and in the even greater success of a TOTO product called Otohimei, or Flush Princess, a box that plays fake flushing sounds to disguise the noise of bodily functions, and is now found in most women’s public restrooms.”
August 24, 2016
“I say that for any non-Japanese person used to a cold, ceramic toilet that does nothing but flush, the Washlet is extraordinary. He’s unconvinced. I’m asking him about the cathode ray when he wants to discuss microrobotics.”
August 24, 2016
“The Wash Air Seat and the early Washlet operated mechanically. It took several minutes for the spray to spray and for the water to heat. TOTO solved this by making the workings electronically operated, the spray instant, and the angle perfect. ”
August 25, 2016
“The nozzle has to be accurate, and to make it so they need to know the average location of the human anus. Facts like this are not easy to find, so they turn to the only source material available, which is anybody on the company payroll. Their workmates aren’t impressed. “Though we are colleagues,” one says with politeness, “I don’t want you to know my anus position.”
August 25, 2016
“Three hundred colleagues are persuaded to sit on a toilet—in private—and to mark the position of their anus by fixing a small piece of paper to a wire strung across the seat.”
August 25, 2016
“Mr. Kawakami is now tasked with improving the Washlet’s ability to wash “the female place.” He needs to know how many centimeters separate a female’s two places, and is initially at a loss. Obviously the best place to research female places is in a place with females, preferably naked ones. That’s where the strip club comes in, though most strip club clientele are unlikely to react as Mr. Kawakami does, shouting, “Three centimeters!”
August 25, 2016
“The Shower Toilet is the Inax Washlet, but with a difference. Twenty-seven degrees of difference. Inax has spent a lot of money deciding that a nozzle aimed at a 70-degree angle has greater firing power and accuracy. They think it cleans better. “TOTO doesn’t want backwash,” says Mr. Tanaka, the senior toilet engineer. “That is why they have 43 degrees. We don’t worry about that because the nozzle is cleaned after every use.” The 1967 version of the Shower Toilet is displayed in the factory showroom. It has a red pedal which had to be pumped to bring up hot water and a blue pedal for cold water. It didn’t sell because it cost the price of a new car and with all that water, things got rusty. It was hard to manufacture, with a 30 to 50 percent ceramic defect rate. Today the defect rate is 5 percent.”
August 25, 2016
“TOTO won over the Japanese public in several ways. On the one hand, there was the gradual approach. Washlets were installed in hotels, department stores, anywhere the public could try them, like them, and never not want to have their bottom washed and dried again. This ensured a slow but steadily growing popularity.”
August 25, 2016
“Then came the advertising. ”
August 25, 2016
“even though it’s a bottom, it wants to be washed, too.” The actress was a singer called Jun Togawa, described to me as a Japanese Cyndi Lauper, and she made her mark. Any Japanese who was sentient in 1982 can probably still recite her catchphrases, which were certainly unlike any others. In another ad, she is shown standing on a fake buttock reading a letter supposedly from her bottom, which writes that “even bottoms have feelings.”
August 25, 2016
“Helped by Japan’s economic growth spurt in the 1980s, and by Inax’s inept advertising, sales of high-function toilets began a slow, steady climb, but with TOTO in the lead. By 1995, 23 percent of Japanese houses had some kind of Washlet, according to a Cabinet Office survey, and by the end of the next decade, the figure had doubled. Inax has yet to catch up.”
August 25, 2016
“TOTO’s genius was to address the wabi sabi soul of the Japanese consumer. Wabi sabi is a cultural and aesthetic philosophy that resists translation, but is usually rendered by the words “simple” or “unfinished.” The Japanese tea ceremony is wabi sabi, as are those clean bathing habits.”
August 25, 2016
“ In an increasingly overcrowded urban environment, it provided the means for keeping a distance from bodily functions that before had been achieved by siting the privy far from the house. Also, it had heated seats. It had music. It turned the four K’s stinky, dark toilet room into a sliver of pleasant private space, a highly desirable thing to have in the notoriously tiny apartments of Japan’s cities.”
August 25, 2016
“After five hours of my questions, Mr. Tanaka shyly offers two of his own. “Why don’t English people want a high-function toilet? Why is Japan so unique?”
I don’t know how to reply. I say something vague about how in the UK and United States, it’s generally presumed that plumbing technology has evolved as far as it needs to.”
August 25, 2016
“TOTO and Inax both covet the enormous Chinese market, but what they really want are Americans. U.S. consumers have more wealth and higher levels of technology. In the eyes of the high-function toilet industry, the United States is frontier country, yet to be conquered, persuaded, and bottom-cleansed. I can’t yet answer Mr. Tanaka’s question, but the land of promise might.”
August 27, 2016
“Campos doesn’t bite. TOTO USA isn’t only about Washlets. Their regular, non-bidet toilets sell well, though nowhere near Kohler’s sales. Campos describes her chosen industry as “very dynamic. It addresses sustainability, the environment, technology, design.” She disagrees with my interpretation of the industry as dull and conservative. There has been innovation, even if it was only in the plumbing. Actually, in recent history, this has been the industry’s only innovation, and one that was forced upon it.”
August 27, 2016
“But American toilets are nothing like Europe’s, and not because they are superior. The American toilet is siphonic, or wash-out. The technology involves complicated principles of air and water flow, but in essence, the U.S. toilet pulls the water out, and the European one pushes it. Manufacturers attempted to make a siphonic flush work with less water by narrowing the pipes, so the siphon effect was increased. It didn’t work. Users were having to flush two or three times. There were difficulties with smell. “In retrospect,” a toilet designer tells me, “it was pretty asinine to think they would just adapt.”
August 27, 2016
“The clogging reputation was hard to shift. Even today, most American toilets will have a plunger nearby, no matter how much American toilet manufacturers protest that they’re outdated. When American Standard launched their high-end Champion range of toilets in 2003, its selling point was its powerful flush. Posters in faux Soviet revolutionary style featured plumbers in overalls brandishing wrenches, and the slogan “Working Towards a Clog-Free Nation.”
August 27, 2016
“American manufacturers’ loss was initially TOTO’s gain. TOTO’s success in Japan had come through clever advertising and marketing, but it was also due to a brown, gloopy material called gi ji obutse, which translates as “fake body waste.”
August 27, 2016
“so key, the recipe is top secret, though they will reveal that it involves soybean paste.
Soybean paste (miso) is a lethal weapon in the battle for toilet market victory, because toilet makers need to test flushes, and they need test media to do it with. A flush is a chaotic event. Various media bounce around trying to get through one small opening. The more realistic the test media, the closer its properties—buoyancy, density—to human feces, the better the flush. Toilet engineers have always known this: when George Jennings’s Pedestal Vase won a gold medal at a Health Exhibition in 1884, it successfully flushed ten apples, one flat sponge, three “air vessels” (crumpled paper), as well as cleaning the “plumber’s smudge” smeared on the toilet bowl surface.”
August 27, 2016
“By the time EPAct came into force, American manufacturers had barely progressed from the apples. They worked with golf balls, sponges, or wiggly bits of plastic. TOTO, though, had been working with a realistic test media for over eighty years.”
August 27, 2016
“In 2002, American Standard had no Ph.D.’s in its R&D department, and now it has five, including an expert in nanotechnology (used to develop antimicrobial coating). But American toilet manufacturers still needed better test media. They couldn’t risk clogging when their reputation was already battered in the eyes of a plunger-weary public, and they could hardly offer their toilets for test drives. Luckily, one day, a Canadian named Bill Gauley became suspicious”
August 27, 2016
“When the NAHB report was published in 2002, he read it carefully. The report was supposed to help municipalities choose which toilet models were efficient enough to deserve rebates from the government. Dozens of toilets had been tested using sponges and paper balls as test media, and then rated with scores.”
August 27, 2016
“Gauley emailed the NAHB and told them politely that their survey was useless. He said they should have used realistic test media—since when did humans excrete sponges?—and that their scoring system was flawed. “To their credit,” he tells me, “they said, ‘You sound like you know what you’re talking about, so raise the funding and you can test the toilets yourself.’ Then I had to put my money where my mouth was.” His first challenge was to find something superior to sponges. He tried potatoes, mashed bananas, flour and water.”
August 27, 2016
“He read that TOTO used soybean paste and asked them for the recipe. When the company refused to reveal it, he asked his colleagues for help. Anyone who went shopping was instructed to “look for anything that might work.” They brought back rice paste and peanut butter, but still Gauley wasn’t satisfied. Finally someone brought in a brand of miso that he thought looked and floated right. “Not that we go around feeling human feces, but some of us have kids and it seemed right, for density and moisture content.”
August 27, 2016
“a 1978 study in the gastroenterological journal Gut eventually yielded the fact that an average bowel movement weighed 250 grams (roughly half a pound). Then Gauley started testing. Of forty toilets that supposedly conformed to the 6-liter requirement, only half passed. ”
August 27, 2016
“Some manufacturers were furious. Lawyers were consulted. Gauley was not intimidated. “We’d videotaped every test. So when they came threatening to sue, we’d show them a good performing toilet and they would usually say, ‘You’re right. We have to improve our toilets.’” And Gauley had to improve his test media. The soybean paste was the right density and weight, but it was messy, and it wasn’t reusable. Then a technician said, “Why don’t you just put sand in a condom?” The physical properties of sand are nothing like feces, but the comment gave Gauley an idea. He bought a packet of Lifestyles non-lubricated and returned to the lab. His colleagues were doubtful. “They said, are you sure it’s going to be strong enough?” He filled one with miso and threw it against the wall. It was strong enough.”
August 27, 2016
“Thanks to Gauley’s artificial poo, Veritec’s MaP is now the best-known independent survey of American toilets available. It is fair to say he’s helped make America’s toilets better, though Pete DeMarco, a senior toilet man at American Standard, keeps his praise on a low heat. He calls MaP “one test among many.” In fact, DeMarco says, a strange macho one-upmanship has taken over the male arena of toilets and testing. To pass the MaP test, toilets have to flush five of the 250-gram condoms and four toilet-paper balls compiled of six sheets of toilet paper each, but some manufacturers go further, bigger, stronger. ”
August 27, 2016
“Ironically, the flush transformation brought about by better test media was bad for TOTO. Gauley’s tests helped other manufacturers reach TOTO’s flushing standards. The company had to find another way to conquer the American market. So it would go back to bottoms. In Japan, TOTO successfully sold its toilets on the concept that they could keep the consumer clean, rather than the other way around.”
August 27, 2016
“On the Web site of the American Bidet Company, company founder Arnold Cohen, who prefers to be called “Mr. Bidet,” expresses his conviction that the bidet “is the most significant innovation for personal hygiene and sanitation since the introduction of indoor plumbing.” But the bidet has known limited spread beyond its French origins, and even in France it is disappearing. Ninety percent of French homes used to have a bidet; now it’s 10 percent. Yet if logic governed human cleansing habits, the bidet would be as common as the toilet. Instead, it has generally been viewed with suspicion or bewilderment. ”
August 27, 2016
“To sell its cleansing products, TOTO had to tell Americans they were dirty. Its first attempt didn’t start well. A huge billboard ad featuring bare bottoms, supposed to hang near Times Square, had to be modified when a church in the building under the billboard successfully applied for an injunction.”
August 27, 2016
“Even with all the flow dynamics and nanotechnology, the modern American toilet has actually only perfected the removal of waste from the toilet while impeding the removal of waste from the body. And the American public is happy with it.”
August 27, 2016
“Perhaps the robo-toilet revolution is simply taking its time. But Tomohiko Satou of Inax is noticeably lacking in TOTO-style optimism. He has a fair sense of American views about robo-toilets, having spent time posted in Inax’s San Francisco office, where sales, he admits, were “not so much.” “Japanese people,” he tells me, “understand that our product is very sanitary and clean.” But years of trying to explain that to Americans taught him a painful truth. “Americans just don’t want to use it. They’re not scared. They’re just not interested.”
Notes From: Rose George. “The Big Necessity.” iBooks.
