The Big Necessity

by Rose George

  TOTO spotted a flawed design that could use some innovation. In 1964, the Wash Air Seat arrived in Japan. Produced by the American Bidet Company, this detachable seat featured a nozzle that sprayed warm water and also blew hot air for drying purposes. In the United States, the Wash Air Seat had been aimed at patients who had difficulty using toilet paper or reaching around to wipe themselves. It was a niche item that TOTO thought had mass appeal. But their version failed. It was too expensive. The bidet function was too foreign. History and habit were both against it.

  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.”

  In their toilet habits, the Japanese were a paper and stick culture. Wipers, not washers. But they were also a cleansing culture with strict bathing rituals and firm ideas about hygiene and propriety. 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.

  These hygiene rules stopped at the outhouse door. The Japanese were as content as the rest of the paper world to walk around with uncleaned backsides. Using paper to cleanse the anus makes as much sense, hygienically, as rubbing your body with dry tissue and imagining it removes dirt. Islamic scholars have known for centuries that paper won’t achieve the scrupulous hygiene required of Muslims. In a World Health Organization publication that attempts to teach health education through religious example, Professor Abdul Fattah Al-Husseini Al-Sheikh quotes the Prophet’s wife, Aisha. She had “never seen the Prophet . . . coming out after evacuating his bowels without having cleaned himself with water.”

  Paper cultures are in fact using the least efficient cleansing medium to clean the dirtiest part of their body. This point was memorably demonstrated by the valiant efforts of a Dr. J. A. Cameron, who in 1964 surveyed the underpants of 940 men of Oxfordshire, England, and found fecal contamination in nearly all of them that ranged from “wasp-colored” stains to “frank massive feces.” Dr. Cameron, though a medical man, could not contain his dismay that “a high proportion of the population are prepared to cry aloud about footling matters of uncleanliness such as a tomato sauce stain on a restaurant tablecloth, whilst they luxuriate on a plush seat in their fecally stained pants.”

  Also, the Japanese didn’t know they wanted better toilets. The writer Jun’ichiro Tanizaki reminisced about visiting a privy perched over a river, so that “the solids discharged from my rectum went tumbling through several tens of feet of void, grazing the wings of butterflies and the heads of passers-by.” But the reality of the Japanese privy had little to do with butterflies. 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.

  Japan has always had a strong tradition of scatological humor, but it operated beneath polite society levels. These days, times have changed enough for a golden feces-shaped object called Kin no Unko (Golden Poo), thought to bring good luck, to have sold 2.5 million units. But in the late 1970s, when TOTO turned to relaunching the Washlet, the toilet—bidet or otherwise—had no place in conversation. It was something detached, unmentionable, out of sight and smell. It could not be advertised. All these factors ensured that the Washlet languished in obscurity for years.

  At TOTO, Asuka is joined by Ryosuke Hayashi. His full title is Chief Senior Engineer and Manager of the Restroom Product Development Department, but he prefers to be called Rick, and he is Rick-looking, with slicked hair and almost good English. Rick is an important man. Of the 1,500 patents that TOTO has filed in Japan (and 600 internationally), the Restroom Department is responsible for half. Rick finds my interest in the Washlet quaint. It’s been around since 1980, after all, when TOTO revamped the Wash Air Seat and launched the Washlet G series (the G stands for “gorgeous”). 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.

  He’d rather talk about the Neorest, TOTO’s top-of-the-line toilet and, in his engineering eyes, an infinitely superior combination of plumbing and computing. Certainly, the Neorest looks gorgeous. It should, when it retails in Japan for $1,700, and in the United States for $5,000. Rick thinks that’s value for money, considering that “it has a brain.” The Neorest takes two days to learn its owner’s habits, and adjusts its heating and water use accordingly. It knows when to switch the heat off and which temperature is preferable. It has sensors to assess when the lid needs to be put down, or when the customer has finished and the nozzle can be retracted. It can probably sense that I’m writing about it.

  The Neorest’s bells and whistles, even if they are nanotechnological bells and warp-speed whistles, are vital, because competition in Japan’s toilet industry is unrelenting. In 2005, TOTO teamed with the construction company Daiwa House to build the Intelligent Toilet, which can measure blood sugar in urine, and by means of pressure pads, weight. It has developed the top-secret CeFiONtect, short for Ceramic Fine Ionizing Technology, which uses a super hydrophilic photocatalyst to repel dirt. This complicated procedure is helpfully translated for me as “like a duck.” Asuka demonstrates the duck glaze properties on a display Neorest in the showroom, marking with a blue pencil both a glazed and unglazed part of the toilet bowl. She looks profoundly unimpressed when the pencil mark is indeed eradicated on the treated area, either because she’s done it before or because it’s not mascara.

  All this technology has come from years of research, billions of yen, many great minds (TOTO has 1,500 engineers), and a visit to a strip club.

  I persist in asking about the genesis of the Washlet and how it changed Japan, and Rick finally humors me. To sell the Washlet to an unwelcoming public, it had to work properly. 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. The Washlet nozzle extends and retracts at exactly 43 degrees, a position precisely calibrated to prevent any cleansing water from falling back on the nozzle after doing its job (this is known as “backwash”). Determining the angle was a long, careful process, says Rick. I ask him how the research was done. He says, “Well, we have 20,000 employees,” and stops. I wait for enlightenment.

  Asuka hands me another comic book by way of an answer. It is a 48-page TOTO history published by Weekly Sankei magazine in 1985, five years after the company had relaunched the Washlet. Its heroes are Mr. Kawakami, a TOTO engineer, and his portly, cheery colleague, Mr. Ito. Kawakami and Ito are entrusted with improving the Washlet. 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 work
mates aren’t impressed. “Though we are colleagues,” one says with politeness, “I don’t want you to know my anus position.”

  Kawakami and Ito prevail by performing the dogeza. This is an exceedingly respectful bow that requires someone to be almost prostrate. It is the kind of bow, a translator later tells me, “that a peasant would do to a passing samurai if he wanted the samurai not to kill him.” She says it is an extremely shocking thing to do in the context of toilets. Yet it worked. 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. The average is calculated (for males, it comes to between 27 and 28 centimeters—about 10½ inches—from the front of the toilet seat), but that’s only the first hurdle. 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!”

  I had fun having the comic strip translated out loud in a quiet restaurant in England one lunchtime when ears wagged and heads tried not to turn. But the strip club and the wire only go so far in explaining TOTO’s extraordinary success. I wanted a second opinion.

  Inax is TOTO’s archrival. The two companies sell similar products, and in fact Inax launched a Washlet-type toilet before TOTO. But they currently have only 30 percent of the market. The Inax factory is near Nagoya, home of Toyota. I had been given instructions by email to take a slow train from Nagoya to Enokido, where I would be met. The train gets emptier and emptier, and the views more rural and less concrete—pretty curved roofs, barns, gardens—until finally I’m the only person left in the carriage. We have arrived at Enokido, which is deserted. I don’t have directions from the station to the headquarters, so I don’t know what to do, until I turn around and see that the station is in Inax’s car park. Of course it is. I bet Toyota doesn’t have a station in its car park, or its name spelled out in 109 tiny toilets (I counted) on the factory lawn.

  I wanted to come to Inax because I’d read about their Shower Toilet. Even in the realm of wonders that is Japanese toilet technology, a toilet in a shower sounded intriguing. A young PR man named Tomohiko Satou has persuaded four senior staff to meet me, and when I tell them this, they laugh. “Oh, we have that problem,” Tomohiko tells me. “The Shower Toilet is called that because it uses a shower—meaning spray—to clean. In the United States, we had to call it Advanced Toilet.”

  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.

  Mr. Tanaka invites me to lunch before a quick factory visit. The cafeteria reception features a perplexing display of a Satis—Inax’s luxury toilet and Neorest rival—encased in a Plexiglass bubble in a fishing net, surrounded by shells, sand, and blue glass and accompanied by the slogan “Our gift to the future.” Tomohiko doesn’t know what it means either.

  The factory is hot. Inax’s ceramic-firing furnace is 328 feet long and burns at 1,200 degrees Fahrenheit. The temperature must remain constant, and the factory works almost year-round, because it takes too long and costs too much to fire up the furnace again. The Inax men show me robots that glue and glide beautifully, which can be trained to do other gliding tasks in only two months—at a punishing cost that cannot be divulged. My hosts ask if I have any questions about the production process, but I can’t think of any. I’m more interested in the means of consumption than production, and specifically, how TOTO managed to vault over Inax in sales of the high-function toilet—and to convince the Japanese to use it in the first place—when Inax’s product was earlier and by some accounts better.

  Oh, they say. That’s easy. The answer to both questions is the same. It was the gorilla and the actress.

  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.

  Then came the advertising. In 1982, Japanese television audiences were treated to the sight of an attractive young woman, her hair and clothes slightly wacky—traditional Japanese wooden shoes, a flouncy dress, hair in bunches—standing next to a toilet and telling viewers that “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.”

  The Inax men sigh. “TOTO had such good ads. Everyone remembers them.” The Inax ads, by contrast, featured a man dressed up in a comedy costume. “It was a gorilla sitting on a toilet bowl. It was supposed to be a true experience.” Until now, my hosts have mostly exuded a quiet gravity. Toilets in Japan are a serious business. But the gorilla cracks their composure. They laugh, partly from bewilderment, as they attempt to explain why using a gorilla to sell a toilet could ever have been a good idea. “We don’t know why we had the gorilla,” says Inax’s senior communications executive. He has been nodding politely for most of the meeting, but the gorilla story unearths a lovely giggle from inside his earnest demeanor. “We can’t even remember the slogan. But I do remember that he was wearing dungarees.”

  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.

  The gorilla also failed because the actress hit the right weak spot. 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. The Washlet wasn’t unfinished, nor was it transient, but it purified both the body and the toilet room. The toilet was now inside the house—and sometimes inside the bathroom—but its nozzles and hot air kept the user safely distant from his or her bodily excreta. All that complicated engineering simplified the unpleasant business of going to the toilet. Rick Hayashi of TOTO has a toilet-related definition for wabi sabi: “clean, simple, no smell.” The bidet-function toilet removed the need to touch the body with toilet paper. 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.

  After five hours of my questions, Mr. Tanaka shyly offers two of his own. “Why don’t English people want a hig
h-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. It works, it flushes, and that’s all that is required. I say I think that’s mistaken, but that’s the way it is. Mr. Tanaka nods with politeness, but neither of us find my answer satisfying. I decide to go to the promised land for enlightenment. 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.

  TOTO opened its first U.S. office in 1989. Its current premises in New York City are in downtown SoHo, in an expensive-looking building in an expensive location, with an expensive toilet—the latest Neorest—in the window. Somehow, the Neorest is glossy and streamlined enough—it recalls the sleekness of a luxury yacht—to fit in well on this street of designer shops and lofts. The location makes sense because of TOTO USA’s business strategy, which is to sell luxury. That’s why I’m in SoHo and not Wisconsin (home to Kohler, America’s toilet market leader) or New Jersey (home to American Standard, the runner-up).

  TOTO USA’s PR chief is Lenora Campos. Her manner is assured and her background educated: she holds a Ph.D. in “the representation of clothing theft in early modern Britain” and describes herself as “a failed academic.” Somewhere along the way from academia to the Neorest, she has developed a nice line in euphemism: she describes her job as “working in high-end plumbing” and excrement as “matter.” But she’s as sharp as her euphemisms are soft. I have come to her with prejudices. The U.S. market is stagnant. American toilets are ugly. They are the “complex and ridiculous thrones” described by the philosopher Alan Watts, who knew Japan and found Western toilets wanting. Americans aren’t interested in innovation, and they don’t want Washlets or change.