The Big Necessity

by Rose George

  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.

  For decades, the average American toilet used a guzzling 3.5 gallons (13 liters) of water in every flush. Some used nearly 5 gallons. By the early 1990s, when several states were reporting water shortages and the concept of water conservation began to take root, it was calculated that the American toilet was using nearly half a household’s water supply. In 1992, the Energy Policy Act (EPAct) was passed, requiring all new toilets within two years to flush with no more than six liters, or 1.5 gallons. It was a shock. This was barely enough time to change production lines, let alone reconfigure a toilet design that depended on a set volume of water to function. The resulting modified toilets were rushed and flawed. The six-liter flush had existed in Europe for years, which probably explains its inclusion in the EPAct. If the Europeans can do it, so can Americans. After all, Americans believe that their plumbing is the best in the world (and that Europe’s is dreadful); that their sanitary appliances, in the words of the anthropologist Francesca Bray, who taught a class about toilets at the University of San Diego, “are at the top of the evolutionary and civilizational scale.”

  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.”

  In plumbing, the post-EPAct era is still known as the time of clogging. Black markets sprang up in old-style toilets. News crews crossed into Canada to interview Americans smuggling back Canadian 13-liter toilets. These toilet pirates were outraged that not only were they being told how much to flush, but that they were being asked to do it with bad equipment. It offended their plumbing and their pride. One cross-border black marketeer interviewed by CNN fumed that “I never thought in Vietnam, you know, when I had to go out in the woods at night, I never thought I’d have a problem here in my own country. . . . We have the best life in the world and we can’t even get a decent toilet now.” And anyway, if the new toilets had to be flushed several times, where was the water conservation?

  In 2001, enough Americans were angry enough to persuade Representative Joe Knollenberg of Michigan to introduce H.R. 1479, the Plumbing Standards Improvement Act. The bill would rescind the low-flow requirements of the EPAct and “get the federal government out of the bathroom.” It was defeated by one vote in committee.

  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.”

  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.” It is, TOTO staff in Japan tell me, “a key part of TOTO,” and 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.

  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. When the National Association of Home Builders (NAHB) published a survey in 2002 testing toilets for flush performance, TOTO models were ranked first, second, and third. This helped TOTO’s reputation and sales: since 2003, annual U.S. sales have doubled (from 14.4 billion yen to 30.1 billion or $257 million). TOTO won’t release sales figures—beyond saying unhelpfully that the company is “the recognized leader in the toilet category,” which would puzzle Kohler—but at least temporarily, gi ji obutse helped to give them the flushing edge in a clogged nation.

  Suddenly, America’s plumbing industry found it had to catch up. Money was put into innovation. 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.

  Gauley is a water engineer by training and curious by nature. By the 1990s, six-liter toilet models had gone on sale after Canadian states brought in water-efficiency rules, but Gauley was skeptical. He did some tests and found that many of the six-liter models were actually using several liters more. 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.

  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. Nothing floated or flushed the same way that human excrement did. 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.”

  All that remained was to set up a drop guide to guarantee the test media always fell in the same spot. (Gauley did this electronically, rather than enlisting the help of his colleagues’ anuses.) Also, he had to calculate the weight of an average deposit. This wasn’t easy, as most research focused on unusual diets, but 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. The results were published as the Maximum Performance (MaP) Testing of Popular Toilet Models, and shortly afterward, the phone calls began. 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.

  After TOTO’s secretiveness, I didn’t expect Gauley to reveal the recipe of his gi ji obutse, and in fact he’s contractually forbidden from doing so. When he found the right brand, he asked to buy 250 kilograms from the importer. “His eyes lit up and he said, ‘How many restaurants do you own?’ I said none and that actually he’d think it was funny but I wanted to use it to test toilets. He didn’t think it was funny and suddenly he didn’t want to sell it to me anymore.” Gauley changed the importer’s mind by promising never to reveal the name of the company. But he plans to publish the recipe online once they’ve analyzed it. “I’m always thinking, how can we help the marketplace? I don’t want the recipe to be proprietary. I’m not trying to sell artificial poo.”

  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. American Standard’s toilets are made to flush 1,000 grams. This bigger-better mentality has reached the consumer. “People want 1,000-gram toilets,” says Gauley, wonderingly. “But even 500 grams is a waste of performance.” An interior designer friend says clients still ask her for 13-liter “traditional” toilets, not understanding that a successful flush uses the force and flow of water, not just volume.

  Gauley says the marketplace has changed “incredibly” since he started playing around with soybean paste. I ask him whether the place of the toilet has changed in American culture, whether it has risen above its basic function. He says no one has ever asked him that before but now that I mention it, no. “Americans want one that works and then they want to forget about it. And that’s it.”

  _______

  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. It would do the same in America. In 2007, the expensive “Clean is Happy” campaign was introduced to the American public. There were smiley-face badges handed out on the street, viral Internet ads, and a lavish Web site featuring disturbingly cheery people telling you what Washlets could do in language Americans could understand. The deodorizer, one cheery person explained, “is kind of like the catalytic converter in your car.” The Washlet provides a “hands-free clean,” said another. It uses water, and what’s so scary about that, when “we wash our faces and hair with water! Humans love water!” I was doubtful. American humans may love water, but not to clean their backsides with.

  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. (One American schoolteacher visiting Paris in 1929 wrote in her diary, “Oh what a mistake we made about the little bathroom for the feet or whatnot.”)

  As Alexander Kira writes, the bidet entails “somewhat special circumstances surrounding the cleansing of the perineal region [that are] in some instances, highly charged emotionally.” New York University sociologist Harvey Molotch, who has written about toilets as consumer items, thinks the bidet has never risen above being seen as unavoidably French, and therefore louche. For centuries, Paris was the place to go for sex and women. Anal washing meant dirty naughtiness, something that may have inspired one American manufacturer to name its bidet model “Carmen.” The abyss between paper and water was highlighted at a 2005 art show held in New York called Lota Stories, in which Americans recorded their experiences of using a lota cup of water in their toilet habits. The results revealed years of frustration. One contributor, mindful of the frustration of trying to use water in the toilet-paper world of America, left useful advice for subterfuge. Filling a plastic cup (preferably khaki, black, or “some other nondescript color”) at the sink will draw less attention. In an apartment-sharing situation, always keep a plant in the bathroom to explain away the watering can. Above all, use discretion: “Ignore the impulse to explain what you are doing, even to friends. Unless people have been using a lota all their lives, the benefits completely escape them, and they will view you as a freak with a freakish bathroom custom.”

  There was another problem. 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. Bare butts, said Pastor Neil Rhodes, would impede churchgoers’ concentration. “You have naked bodies before your eyes,” he told the New York Post. “How are you going to close your eyes and seek God?” The ad was an odd move to make in a country where conservatism can border on the puritan. Lenora Campos of TOTO is sensitive to this. “Americans do have issues around the body and bodily functions. We are very uncomfortable discussing it.” The billboard was changed because, she said, it was “off the mark. If the message is being lost and something is being generated that is unforeseen, then that message has to be changed.”

  Delicate sensibilities have always made selling toilets and toilet products difficult. It’s hard to advertise your product when social mores don’t allow you to say what the product is for. Toilet paper manufacturers have responded to this in mostly uncreative ways (except for the 1920s slogan “Ask for Hakle and then you don’t have to mention toilet paper”). Since then, toilet paper advertising has been unrelentingly pastels and puppies. It’s dull but it works. The global toilet paper industry is worth $15–20 billion, and according to the most recent statistics available, the average American uses 57 sheets a day.

  In 2002, the toilet tissue brand Velvet departed from the norm by launching a campaign that featured “a series of lovingly photographed bare bottoms,” with the tagline “Love your bum.” It became the second most complained about ad in the UK that year (the first, an image for an antipoverty charity, featured a cockroach emerging from a baby’s mouth). The world of toilet paper, said a creative director for Velvet’s ad agency, “had a huge gap” compared to the creativity levels of advertisers dealing with other markets.

  Toilet advertising in the United States was in equal difficult
ies. American Standard’s Soviet-style campaign was successful because it was unusual. But most advertising still featured conservative shots of the classic American “throne” toilet, stiff in its lines and defiantly unstreamlined. At American Standard, the throne has been modernized by making it even higher, the better to take the strain off aging baby-boomers’ legs. It’s now an astonishing 16.5 inches from rim to floor, even more ergonomically nonsensical than usual (squatting frees up the colon and aids defecation; sitting squeezes it shut and impedes release, leading to claims that the sitting toilet has contributed to increased rates of colon cancer, hemorrhoids, and constipation). 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.

  TOTO hopes to sell its products for their health benefits. Colonic irrigation is increasingly fashionable; why not another form of healthy cleansing? But toilet paper manufacturer Kimberly-Clark also tried to appeal to health concerns when it launched Cottonelle Fresh Rollwipes, moist toilet paper on a roll. In surveys, two-thirds of Americans polled agreed that moist tissues cleaned better than dry paper. Kimberly-Clark consequently spent $100 million on the launch. Sales of Rollwipes were dismal, and the concept disappeared from shelves. It has yet to be resurrected. Americans apparently don’t want water anywhere near their perineal region, at least not yet.