Why the Japanese Toilet Is The Most Considered Item in The World
I didn’t want to write this essay, but I was compelled to…by a toilet. A Japanese toilet.
I’m not referring to the features nor the technical doodads, i’m referring more to the consideration. The thought that is not only behind but the thought that is on the behind for every feature, every doodad.
Now you might be thinking, ‘oh look honey, it’s another a non-Japanese person who’s obviously just returned from a holiday there & wants to tell the world about this new thing he thinks no-one knows about but actually the whole world already knows about’
Not quite.
MY PERSONAL EXPERIENCE
20 years ago I moved to Japan & lived there for a number of years. In Tokyo to be precise. During the day I taught English to Japanese people which involved teaching conversational English to adults & yelling the word ‘carrot’ repeatedly to a class of 5 year olds, and to all my students who were walking around foreign countries whilst on holiday saying things like, ‘I love muesli, I love cheese’ and referring to rain with ‘oh look, it’s pissing down’, i’m so sorry. I was young & foolish & thought it was funny but obviously it…it is quite funny actually. So that’s what I did during the day whilst at night I DJed at various nightclubs & events around Tokyo. At that time I shared an apartment with 2 other foreigners. A stock standard Japanese apartment. Australia at that time was going through a long and very severe drought, there were water restrictions put in place, people weren’t allowed to wash their cars, we were encouraged to have shorter showers & thoughts of water saving innovations were top of mind for many. So naturally the first thing I noticed about my apartment was the toilet.
It was one of the older ones which didn’t have any of the technical doodads, but it did have the faucet & basin built into the top of the cistern. So when you flush, the water flows through the faucet allowing you to wash your hands. Then the soapy water would flow from the basin into the cistern saving you from using additional water to wash your hands whilst depositing soapy, fragrant water in your cistern ready for the next flush. The soapy water was better at cleaning the bowl whilst helping with the deodorisation, and the fact that you washed your hands & dried them prior to manhandling the toilet door handle added to the hygiene benefits.
I thought this was brilliant!!
But then, questions…
Why wasn’t this a feature of every toilet? Especially in my home country?
I can’t be the first Aussie to have seen this, or can i?
Why does Japan even have this? They have no water shortage problems at all!
Is it a cultural thing?
At that time I was still young and clueless about Japanese culture, I didn’t know a damn thing about Japan. Why did I go there?
My best friend moved there a couple of years earlier & told me it was heaps of fun, I like fun, so I went knowing little to nothing about Japan. I learnt very quickly how to order food. As long as the menu had a picture of the dish, I would point to it and say ‘KORE!’. I learnt how to go to an izakaya & order the 90 minute nomihodai (all you can drink) and tabehodai (all you can eat) deal. I learnt the difference between salt and sugar after learning the hard way. That was the worst coffee I’ve ever made. And I learned very quickly the difference between peach flavoured pudding & crab flavoured tofu. I thought I had suppressed that memory forever but here we are.
So as you can deduce my priorities in life were vastly different to what they are now & not at all conducive to starting a business using information arbitrage. I just wanted to DJ, make music and party…Come to think of it, I still want to do that.
However, over time I learnt a lot more about Japanese culture. One of the things that stood out to me was the spirit of mottainai, which translates to ‘what a waste!’. Mottainai was embedded into the culture of a country which is 22 times smaller than Australia but has 5 times the population & very little in the way of natural resources. I understood how this mindset can lead to putting consideration at the forefront of Japanese products & product development roadmaps.
CONSIDER THIS
Those who have been to Japan will have noted the absence of public rubbish bins & yet the streets are mostly free from rubbish. I’m not going to go too deep into the behavioural science behind this but basically we’re herd animals. If the streets were full of rubbish, you would think it’s ok to also throw your rubbish on the street because other people have done it before you. I’m not saying it’s right to do that, I'm saying (and there’s plenty of studies on this) that this is what is most likely to happen. However, if no one is littering and the streets are clean, you are less likely to be the first one to litter because you will likely be the only one & attract the wrong kind of attention.
Now I’m not saying Japanese people don’t litter; there’s a certain time & place for that, like a street festival, but on the whole, clean up activities are pretty much embedded into them since school age because they gotta clean their school & classroom. There’s a lot more to this but what I want you to focus on is what happens to the behaviour of the person from outside of this cultural behaviour…well what happens is they conform.
An example of conforming in Japan is carrying your rubbish with you until you find a bin to dispose of it. Most likely in your home, a train station or a convenience store.
BRIEF SIDENOTE
There are tons of convenience stores in Tokyo & when I was living there every convenience store had 3 rubbish bins outside right next to the main entrance.
Everyone knew this and just threw their rubbish there. However, with the increasing popularity of Japan as a holiday destination from, get this, 6.7 million tourists in 2005 to almost 32 million in 2019, that’s a 5 fold increase!
You can imagine these bins started to get so full so quickly that convenience stores were not able to keep up with the disposal. So naturally, now they have now not only placed the bins inside the stores, they have made them smaller too. In addition, most train stations only have a minimal number of bins.
AN EXAMPLE OF CONSIDERATION
So with this ‘mottainai’ mindset in mind, I want to show you some chewing gum I bought from Japan. I opened it up and was kind of perplexed to find a mini sticky note pad in there. The first thing I thought was, ‘what is this? Sticky notes for ANTS?!’, but then I read the writing on the gum container & quickly realised; I don’t know how to read Japanese. So I asked my wife, who does know how to read Japanese & she told me that these are papers you can use to wrap your chewed gum with so it’s easier to store it in your pocket when you’re done & it won’t get stuck anywhere even when you’re throwing it in the bin.
You see what I mean when I say ‘considered’?
Right, so let’s get back to, and our backsides to, what is probably the most considered item in the world. The modern Japanese toilet. Sometimes referred to as the washlet toilet, sometimes (and incorrectly) referred to as a bidet, I’m just going to call it the Japanese toilet.
RAFFI’S THEORY OF SEXINESS & INNOVATION
The levels of innovation on this contraption is unusual for an un-sexy item. You see, I have a hypothesis, that the level of innovation & attention to development is exponentially related to how sexy it is. Refer to the science-amatic graph below:
LONE GEEK SCENARIO (LGS)
There is only one caveat to my hypothesis & that has to do with the ‘Lone Geek Scenario’ or LGS. The LGS posits that whenever there is a lone geek who makes it their life mission to pursue the product development of an un-sexy item, then the item in question behaves the same way as a sexy item where the level of obsession by the lone geek has an exponential relationship to the level of innovation.
Toilets are un-sexy. Not even the ageless beauty of Naomi Campbell could make them sexy, trust me, she tried & failed hard; maybe because it wasn’t a Japanese toilet (And this isn’t her only toilet pic):
The Lone Geek in the toilet game is the Japanese company called TOTO (They’re not a band, they have nothing to do with the rains over Africa. I’m sorry if that’s in your head now). Before we jump into the features & doodads of the Japanese toilet, we need to learn about why it was invented in the first place.
It was a bidet seat aimed at hospital patients and older adults with mobility issues, which prevented them from properly cleaning themselves after ‘toileting’ (which I just learned is the actual word for this activity). Once again consideration makes an appearance.
TOTO
worked its collective buttocks off (pun intended) to develop a reliable & life improving product. They even had 300 of their employees be the test subjects when they were trying to figure out what angle they should be squirting water out of the wand to hit the target area.
Let’s take a look at a timeline of their improvements:
1983
Automatic Self-Cleaning Wand (before and after each use)
1988
Wand Positioning, Wireless Remote Control, SOFTCLOSE® Seat, SOFTCLOSE Lid
1992
Ozone Deodorizer, Pulsating Water Massage, Oscillating Water Massage
1993
One-Touch Lid Removal (for easy cleaning)
1995
One-Touch WASHLET Main Unit Removal (for easy cleaning)
1997
Automatic O2 Deodorizer (from seated position)
1999
Wonder-Wave Water Technology (increases personal cleansing comfort and reduces water usage by more than 30%)
2001
Automatic Energy Saving
2003
Auto Open/Close Lid, Auto Flush
2011
EWATER+® Cleaning Technology for Wand (before and after each use)
2012
Toilet Bowl Cleaning Technologies: PREMIST® (before each use) and EWATER+ (after each use)
2017
AIR-IN WONDER-WAVE® Water Technology (air-infused water droplets further increase personal cleansing comfort and reduce water consumption)
Let’s play out a scenario:
You enter the toilet, the sensor detects you’re in there & automatically opens the lid
If you want to just stand & deliver you can either make the hand gesture or press the button to automatically raise the seat also
If you want to drop some friends off at the pool, then you take a seat
The seat is already automatically sanitised
The seat is heated to the temperature that you have set it to
Once you sit, sounds start to play, or music, whatever you’ve set it to. This is to hide any noises you make (especially helpful in work/public toilets)
A fan is removing any smelly air from the bowl whilst you’re seated
You can flush without having to stand up knowing that the whirlpool flushing action is not going to bathe your undersides with excrement water
You can initiate the cleaning wand which comes out & hits your target cleaning area
You can choose if you only want to clean the target area or if you want a full bath of your undersides
You can adjust the water pressure of the cleaning wand
You can adjust the temperature of the water coming out of the cleaning wand
Once done you can initiate the air drier
Once dry you can clothe yourself, wash hands & leave
Before you leave you turn around to give the Japanese toilet a smile & a wink
It then bows to you by lowering the lid slowly
You both look at the toilet paper & laugh
Now that sounds like a pretty considered experience.
But is this the end?
Hell no!
VISION FOR THE FUTURE
This is where I put my Product Manager hat on & tell you my roadmap if the Japanese toilet was something I was in charge of (quick sidenote: I am a Product Manager, this is what I do for living):
As you enter, the sensor can identify you & engage your last used settings, or if you had your phone with you then it knows via your ‘toileting’ app, it knows what settings you prefer & adjusts itself regardless if this was your home, your friend’s house or a public toilet
There are sensors in the bowl that can detect the health of your gut microbiome & tell you what you are lacking or if you are dehydrated & you should drink more water today, it can tell you that you’ve actually caught the flu (or other virus) but are still asymptomatic & inform you via the app
An AI assistant can suggest certain dietary & lifestyle changes to bring you back to a balanced state of gastrointestinal health (AI is required because each person’s gut microbiome is unique like a fingerprint so no two people will have the same recommendations. AI is required to learn from your personalised, unique data set to recommend what’s best specifically for you)
On a more macro level, this information can be vital to tracking the health of the populace of an area, demographic, city, nation state etc & lead to the development & promotion of foods that are beneficial to people’s overall health along with identifying the causes & initial breakout areas of common maladies, viruses, bacterial pathogens etc
PROPER POOPING POSITION (PPP)
However, there is a MAJOR FLAW in the Japanese toilet design in that, it’s still a western style toilet & western style toilets are not conducive to Proper Pooping Position (or what I like to call, the PPP).
PPP is only achieved in the natural squatting position. In the squat position your puborectalis muscle, which is the muscle most important for maintaining faecal continence (AKA not shitting your pants), is disengaged, but when you’re seated regularly on a western toilet the puborectalis muscle acts as a kind of noose around your colon, preventing you from emptying properly.
Not being in the PPP also means you’re not naturally exerting pressure on your bowels to empty but rather pushing (and sometimes straining) so that you can empty. This can lead to many bowel issues of which the most common is haemorrhoids.
There are of course many simple solutions already on the market for this such as step stools, products like the ‘Squatty Potty’ etc.
However
it would be a game changer if the step was actually ‘built-in’ to the toilet itself so you’re not having to keep extra paraphernalia in what is already the smallest room in the house.
In addition
to having the step built into the toilet, I would have it adjustable so that it can be raised, lowered & inclined based on your height, length of your legs & where your pivot points are so that it can simulate specifically for you the ideal angle to promote the maximum emptying with the minimal exertion. This can be done manually or settings suggested automatically via your ‘Toileting’ app.
Happy considered Toileting 😀