How the Opportunist Toilet Kept Getting Smarter in Japan | QDaily Business History

To stop your toilet lid from drifting to the right, buy a smart toilet seat and free your hands.

The toilet, also called the seated toilet, strikes some people as a great invention, one that spared us the ungainly crouch of the squat pan. Others call the flush toilet the root of all evil, because it swallows so much of a household's water.

Those two verdicts describe exactly the direction the toilet has taken ever since it was invented. Until someone builds a waterless one, it has only two missions: to be more "comfortable and convenient," and to use as little water as possible.

You already know which country cares most about this. Japan.

In August this year, LIXIL, the Japanese supplier of bathroom fixtures and building materials, developed a super-water-saving toilet that flushes with just 1 liter of water — the best-performing toilet on the market today still needs 3.8 liters — and plans to bring it to Japan sometime after 2017.

TOTO, which has never left the front line of toilet research, keeps a prototype at its research institute in Kanagawa Prefecture that it wants in service by 2020. Fukuda, the institute's director, explains: "By measuring the concentration of certain gases in feces, you can tell how healthy the intestines are."

In April this year, TOTO began selling a new "lift-assist toilet," which helps the elderly and people with weak legs sit down and stand up.

Warm-water washing, a heated ring, automatic sterilization, warm-air drying: smart toilet seats combining all of it had already reached 90% penetration in public places in Japan — and that figure is six years old. Room to improve the toilet itself is running out (for the Japanese, at least), so they have even started on designs that help agriculture, such as how to separate the liquid from the solid to make better fertilizer. Or, unable to flush with any less water, they have begun asking whether the instant of the flush could generate power — that's right, in the future, when you press the button and yell at the toilet, "Eat shit!," you might just produce 1 watt of electricity.

Why do the Japanese care so much about improving the toilet? The smart toilet wasn't even theirs to begin with; it started in the United States. There are all sorts of reasons. Before we get to why it caught on in Japan, look at why it never caught on in Europe and America.

In 1964, an American named Arnold Cohen invented a smart toilet seat that both washed and dried, and patented it. He had spent two years on this high-end fixture, mainly to make life easier for his sick father, who had trouble getting around.

With the patent in hand he saw a business, so he set up a company, worked the trade shows, and spent heavily on advertising. According to The New York Times, in 45 years Cohen's company sold only 200,000 toilets. The main problem was the advertising: everyone found the subject too crude, too far below the belt. "Nobody wants to hear you talk about how to clean your butt."

So he licensed the patent to Japan's TOTO Ltd. In 1980, TOTO improved the product, put the Washlet name on it, and turned it into a household appliance more common in Japan than the computer. Cohen's patent, meanwhile, expired soon after. Electronic toilet seats did not make it back to the United States until 1989, and 20 more years passed before smart toilet seats grew cheap enough for ordinary people to afford. Only then did American merchants embrace them.

Washlet

Anyone who has played SimCity knows that if you don't build enough sewage treatment, citizens pop up speech bubbles to blame you. The toilet, the last stop of a sewage system, was in fact invented long ago — yet in 1930s Shanghai you would still find neighbors bleary-eyed at dawn, chamber pots in hand, queuing at the public tap. Public water and urban sewage systems had not caught up: even with a flush toilet, without a steady supply of water it still wasn't a convenient thing to use.

In Japan the sequence ran the other way. The Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923 devastated Tokyo. Rebuilding meant drainage systems on a huge scale, and demand for sanitary fixtures shot up. A group of companies led by TOTO rose fast on the back of it.

Hotel New Otani Tokyo

The Meiji Restoration of the 1860s exposed Japan to the shock of industrial civilization, and the companies growing wild across Japanese society imported new technology without pause — Cohen's patent among it. The 1964 Tokyo Olympics, carried by the same economic boom, also lifted the hotel trade, and Tokyo's grand hotels began installing toilets with the newest technology one after another.

Americans, meanwhile, still could not get interested in the smart toilet. For one thing, they saw nothing unhygienic or inconvenient about paper. For another, during World War II the British collectively rejected this spray-washing device, popular enough in Europe, on the grounds that the French import would infect them with a hedonism they had no business acquiring. The attitude traveled to the United States: American soldiers, the story goes, found these bidets in European brothels during the war, which deepened their disgust and made the fixture the star of a certain class of dirty joke.

Yet the product that put up with all this abuse thrived in Japan. In most of the world the toilet is seen as a place where filth collects. The Japanese call it otearai, where the honorific o marks respect. Shinto, the religion Japan follows, has a great many deities, one of them the toilet god. Local folklore holds that the toilet god governs fertility and is a beautiful goddess: if a woman keeps the toilet clean, her children will be born good-looking.

Many rituals take place in Japanese toilets. On the seventh day after a child is born the family goes there to pay respects; in some places people cut a piece of rice cake and carry it to the toilet as an offering. That is how much the toilet matters to them — and why a bad smell is simply unbearable.

We have reported before on Gallery TOTO, the toilet exhibition TOTO built in Terminal 2 of Narita Airport. Few countries put their toilet culture on display in a place as international as an airport. Japan is one of them.

Finally, two pieces of trivia worth sharing.

In Japan, the potty small children use is called omaru, sometimes written with characters meaning "honorable tiger cub," and the name may come from old Chinese. According to 《西京杂记》, or Miscellaneous Records of the Western Capital, the world's earliest chamber pot appeared in the Han dynasty and was called a huzi, or "tiger cub," a jade object reserved for the emperor.

Also, a veteran observer who has inspected no small number of toilets (not me) reports that toilet lids, without exception, tilt slightly to the right. "It's a bit creepy. Is it designed that way on purpose?"

Some of you have already gone to look at the toilet lid at home. Well: it is because most people are right-handed. When you tear off a length of toilet paper — an everyday motion — your body leans left to balance it, and that force nudges the lid to the right. Year after year, your toilet lid ends up crooked.

Which leads to one conclusion: most toilets are opportunists.