Why Did a Company Like TOTO Emerge in Japan? | QDaily Business History

TOTO turns 100 this year, and we want to trace how the Japanese pursuit of cleanliness and care for one's own body got to where it is today, how the toilet holds a concentrated form of Japanese culture, and what part commercial companies played in it.

No one takes as much care over going to the toilet as the Japanese, or brings as much decorum to it. It has even become a distinctive side of Japanese spiritual life.

At the 2010 Kōhaku Uta Gassen, Japan's answer to China's Spring Festival Gala, Kana Uemura sat with a guitar and sang nearly eight minutes of Toilet Goddess. "Grandma told me this," she sang, "a very beautiful goddess lives in the toilet." The Japanese do worship a toilet god, and believe that cleaning the toilet diligently earns his protection and improves your luck.

The toilet became a place of solace for the Japanese, not just a repository of filth.

That psychological need turned into a market insight for companies, and one of its most important results has been a rush of innovation around the toilet, a product that embodies modern civilization. The most representative company here is TOTO, which once staged a toilet exhibition at Narita Airport, saying it hoped "to free people from the stereotype of the toilet as something closed and dark."

Few countries would put toilet culture on display in a space as international as an airport. Judging by its business record, TOTO has earned the right. Since it was founded in 1917 it has entered markets in 17 countries and regions, and at home it holds 60.7% of the Japanese bath-and-sanitary-ware market, a lead no one has managed to shake.

TOTO turns 100 this year, and we want to trace why a company like this was born in Japan, how the Japanese pursuit of cleanliness and care for one's own body got to where it is today, how the toilet holds a concentrated form of Japanese culture, and what part commercial companies played in it.

"I don't feel the value of your product."

"We're fighting against common sense."

Start with the toilet seat that drove Chinese consumers wild. Carried by the force of "buy, buy, buy," cumulative shipments of TOTO's Washlet reached 40 million units by 2015. It is now the engine of TOTO's global growth, and sales are forecast to rise another 40% year on year this year. TOTO's 2016 financial report said that if overseas Washlet sales in 2012 are indexed at 100, the figure had climbed to 246 by 2016, a jump of 130% over 2015.

Plenty of WeChat official accounts and media outlets have picked apart the buying frenzy over this toilet seat, with its warm-water washing, heated ring, warm-air drying and smart deodorizing. The quality implied by "made in Japan" is the reason most often given. But a deeper one may be that buyers want to move the "Japanese-style care" they have just experienced into their own homes, immediately and completely. The icons on the Washlet's control panel often baffle first-time visitors to Japan, yet a single trip to the toilet is enough to deliver a strong culture shock: attention to your own body can be this thorough.

The Washlet was not TOTO's invention, and it did not start in Japan. In 1964, an American named Arnold Cohen, wanting to make life easier for his sick and barely mobile father, invented a toilet seat that combined washing and drying, and patented it. TOTO bought the patent from Cohen and began making and selling the seat in Japan. Because the thing is used in private, the first generation shipped without enough test data behind it: water temperature was unstable, the nozzle's spray angle imprecise. Complaints followed. Traditional squat toilets still dominated the market at the time, and the product, then sold as the Wash Air Seat, was essentially a failure.

In 1980, TOTO improved it and put a new trademark on it: Washlet. The company probably never guessed it would end up a household appliance more common in Japan than the computer.

TOTO took the product seriously, since it was meant to carry the company through the slump that followed the global oil crisis. It hired the actress Jun Togawa for a commercial, and in the evening prime-time slot on Japanese television, Togawa bent over and delivered the line "Your bottom wants washing too." It set off a fierce reaction and no small controversy, and became the most popular ad line of the year.

Takashi Nakahata, the well-known Japanese advertising man who wrote that line, had turned TOTO down at first: "I don't feel the value of your product." So TOTO's staff painted blue pigment straight onto Nakahata's hand and asked him to wipe it off with paper. The pigment, of course, stayed. "Your bottom is the same. Wash it with water and it gets cleaner. We're fighting against common sense." Nakahata was convinced, and that way of showing the cleaning effect later went into the Washlet's own advertising.

Cohen, meanwhile, saw a business in the patent, started a company and spent heavily on advertising. According to The New York Times, in 45 years his company sold only 200,000 seats. People found the whole subject crude, too much about the lower body: "nobody wants to hear you talk about how to wash your rear end."

In Japan, as you can see, the result was the opposite. Cleaner than paper, able to prevent hemorrhoids and ease the pain of illness, the Washlet changed how Japanese people use the toilet and was voted one of Japan's top ten postwar inventions. Its functions grew from basic washing to a heated ring, deodorizing and energy saving, and it kept getting smarter.

Today "Washlet" stands in for the whole category. As of March 2017 it was in 79.1% of Japanese households. TOTO holds 54% of the Washlet market, with INAX second at 24% and Panasonic third at 10%.

The Commercial Value of Shame

Beyond the Washlet, a product TOTO created in the 1980s called Otohime, or Sound Princess, says even more about Japanese spiritual life.

The American scholar Ruth Benedict wrote about Japan's "shame culture" in The Chrysanthemum and the Sword. Japanese shame comes from outside constraint: sensitive as they are, Japanese people feel their self-respect wounded by mockery and criticism from others. Using the toilet is already an awkward thing to bring up, and for people whose sense of shame runs this deep, even a stranger they will never meet hearing the sounds of them in the toilet is endlessly embarrassing. More so for women.

To cover the sound, many Japanese women flushed several times in public restrooms. To solve the problem, TOTO put out an electronic device that mimics running water: the Otohime. By TOTO's calculation, women take about 25 seconds to urinate, so one press of the button gives 25 seconds of running water. As the technology improved, models with automatic sensors appeared, sounding as soon as someone comes near the toilet.

The product brought a second commercial benefit: saved water. According to figures the Japan Toilet Association gave QDaily, a workplace with 400 women saves about 551 liters of water a year with the Otohime, worth 3.86 million yen (about 231,600 yuan) in water bills; an ordinary restaurant or hair salon saves around 80,000 yen (about 4,800 yuan).

The Otohime grew out of a shame culture particular to Japan, and could never have been born in a country with a bolder, rougher temperament. It has also never made it out of the Japanese market.

Water saving has long been one line of innovation in the flush toilet, and in Japan the first push came from a natural disaster.

In 1978, Fukuoka Prefecture had a drought of a kind Japan rarely sees. Fukuoka City passed a water-conservation ordinance and, for 287 days, shut off the water every night from 9 p.m. to 6 a.m. "School swimming pools closed" and "even at hotels, bathing time was limited" are the sort of memories Japanese people who lived through it keep of the crisis.

TOTO, whose head office happens to sit in Fukuoka Prefecture, was the first Japanese bath-and-sanitary-ware company to answer the policy. For Fukuoka City it launched a water-saving toilet that used 35% less water than conventional models, with a 13-liter flush.

That was also when Japanese people realized, with a start, that the flush toilet was the biggest water user in the house: 28% of household water, ahead of bathing (24%), cooking (23%) and laundry (16%). Once the drought ended, the bath-and-sanitary-ware brands saw an enormous market in this. Other Japanese makers such as INAX and Janis followed, and water-saving toilets gradually spread through the Japanese market. In 1993 TOTO was first with a 6-liter flush, then came ultra-water-saving models at 4.8 liters in 2009 and 3.8 liters in 2012.

Saved water became one of TOTO's competitive advantages. The company once worked out that if a family of four swapped a 13-liter toilet for a 4.8-liter one, the water saved in a year would cover another 7.4 months of baths, and the household would keep about 14,200 yen (about 852 yuan) in water bills.

As water scarcity draws more attention worldwide, a good many countries have set 6 liters as the national standard. In 2017 China required average toilet water use to fall from 7.2 liters to 6.4 liters; some U.S. states cap the flush at 4.8 liters.

The "Opportunistic" Toilet

The water-saving toilet is only one case of TOTO catching an opportunity. Look back over the past 100 years and you find a company built on opportunism, where every opening threw an innovation switch.

The Japanese did not, of course, pour this much passion into toilets and restrooms from the start.

In 1914, Nihon Toki, TOTO's predecessor, invented Japan's first flush toilet. It did not bring the company immediate success. Japanese people then knelt around low tables to eat and slept on tatami; the toilet was sold as more comfortable to use sitting down, but sitting had not yet entered the Japanese way of life. The bigger problem was that even Tokyo, the capital, had no complete sewer system.

An earthquake nobody saw coming changed how Japan used the toilet, and TOTO rose out of the disaster.

On September 1, 1923, the magnitude-7.9 Great Kanto Earthquake struck the Kanto region, and all of Tokyo was wrecked. The drainage networks built after World War I were destroyed and water was cut off across much of the city. Normal supply did not return until three months after the quake.

More important, the earthquake sped up Tokyo's urbanization.

As villages and towns merged, public and private drainage networks around the region were folded into the Tokyo waterworks, and by 1945 today's Tokyo sewer network had taken shape in outline.

Rebuilding and renovating raised Japanese demand for Western-style sanitary fixtures. Traditional single-family houses could no longer hold the population pouring into the cities, so the government began building apartment blocks called danchi. Flush toilets entered danchi for the first time in 1956, and TOTO's toilet business finally took off.

For TOTO, and for the whole bath-and-sanitary-ware market, the more landmark moment came at the Tokyo Olympics: TOTO's "era-defining invention," the Unit Bath.

On the eve of the Games, the Hotel New Otani Tokyo had more than 1,000 guest bathrooms to renovate. Under the standard bathroom-fitting process of the day, carrying all the parts into a single bathroom took a full month; even at a rush, all the rooms would take 17 months, and still not be done before the Olympics opened.

TOTO invented the Unit Bath: every part of the bathroom assembled in advance at the factory, then carried straight out of the elevator into the hotel, its base a single molded piece. In the end the technology cut the Hotel New Otani's schedule to a tenth of what it would have been. Every guest bathroom was finished in three and a half months, and what had looked at the time like an impossible job was done.

Simple to install and light on labor, the Unit Bath proved at the Olympics that it could be copied at scale, and after the Games the three-piece version, bath plus toilet plus washbasin, went into ordinary home bathrooms as well.

Another big advantage was that it did not leak. Japanese people love hot springs and like to soak at home, but wooden tubs hold heat poorly, and once families moved into danchi apartments a wooden tub plainly clashed with the bathroom around it.

In 1958, TOTO's rival INAX was first to launch resin bathtubs. They held heat far better than traditional wooden tubs and spread quickly through the danchi. But INAX's resin tubs still could not solve waterproofing.

The Unit Bath solved it perfectly, and since most Japanese bathrooms are on the small side, it can also be read as another form of storage. By 2014, Unit Baths were in about 95% of Japanese bathrooms.

The pursuit of cleanliness, in fact, also began with the Tokyo Olympics. The scholar Shigenori Yamaji has described what Japanese public toilets looked like in the 1950s: near Kyobashi Station in Osaka stood a shared men's and women's public toilet that fit two or three people at a time. The whole building stank, and newspapers passers-by had read inside lay scattered on the floor. This ran against the shame culture at the core of the Japanese character, and against the meticulous attention that Japanese service calls omotenashi.

The Tokyo Olympics and the 1970 Osaka World Expo, two international events the whole country watched, both became occasions for Japan's toilets to get cleaner. Public toilets everywhere, on the highways and in the parks, turned into places where Japan showed the world its face.

The Toilet Peer association, forerunner of the Japan Toilet Association, also started a toilet "improvement campaign." In the first phase, 1984 to 1994, the goal was clean, tidy and free of smell; over the following decade, 1995 to 2005, it shifted to making public toilets multifunctional, so people could touch up their makeup, change a baby's diaper or change clothes in them.

The Japanese no longer see the toilet as a place for excretion. Junko Kobayashi is an architect and a vice president of the Japan Toilet Association, and to her the toilet is the contemporary Japanese person's "tea room". Even for the few minutes someone spends in that tiny space, the "tea room" should let them relax and catch their breath.

The toilet has also become a way for Japanese retailers to stand out from one another and show customers how they run their business. Nearly every department store sets aside an area with a vanity table for women to redo their makeup, and some install lighting that makes it easier; a few put new soaps from their in-store brands in the restroom for customers to try.

As it happens, TOTO, which grew fast on the "Olympic economy," is an official partner of the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. "We hope to carry Japan's clean toilet culture to people all over the world," said TOTO president Madoka Kitamura.

Tokyo's Shibuya ward has begun a large overhaul of its public toilets, and has sold the naming rights to them. Station restrooms, which once aimed only at clean and tidy, now aim where the department stores do: the toilets at Seibu Railway's Ikebukuro Station come with background music and a citrus scent.

One thing is certain: Japanese enthusiasm for this will not stop. But the room left for innovation in the toilet itself may already be small. What Satoshi Yamakawa of TOTO's first sanitary-ware development department calls "a product designed with the next 100 years in mind" is really just a more expensive product: the NEOREST NX, at 570,000 yen (about 34,200 yuan). For this toilet aimed at wealthy buyers and high-end hotels, the Japanese press reached for phrases like "a toilet like a work of art" and "a toilet you can't help wanting to touch."

Whatever else, this drive to perfect a product deserves credit. For the Japanese, the toilet is a space that stores sound, filth and care for one's own body all at once, a concentration, or a distillation, of the Japanese spirit of living. A company like TOTO, in all likelihood, could only have been born in Japan.

Unless otherwise noted, the cover image and the images in this article are courtesy of TOTO.