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Authors: Rose George
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countries. With the Washlet, TOTO has given the Japanese language a new word, and the Japanese people a new way of going to the toilet. It is a phenomenon.
I arrange to visit the TOTO Technical Center in Tokyo. It is a low, sleek building, oddly located in a residential street in an ordinary eastern suburb which has a mom-and-pop hardware shop on the main street, no neon, and no visible foreigners. The Technical Center is described as a place âwhere architects come to get ideas about designs.â It is a show-and-copy emporium, big, spotless, and empty of people or architects. Sample bathroom sets gleam in the distance; a row of toilets automatically lift their lids as I walk past, in a ceramic greeting ceremony. Photographs are forbidden, leading me to wonder what an architect whoâs no good at sketching is supposed to do. But the toilet industry in Japan is a highly competitive business, and the top threeâTOTO, Inax, and Matsushitaâkeep their secrets close. My requests to visit TOTOâs product development laboratories were politely refused.
My guide is a young woman called Asuka. She works in TOTOâs investor relations department and has probably been instructed to deal with me because she went to school in the United States for a few years and speaks near-perfect Valley Girl. Perhaps Iâve met too many engineers, but she doesnât seem like someone who would work in this industry. When she sees a World Toilet Organization sticker on my glasses case, she says âon Gucci!â with genuine distaste. She later confesses that, actually, sheâd rather be marketing cosmetics. She says TOTO is a good employer, though Iâm disappointed to discover that rumors of certain employee perks are unfounded. They do not get free toilets.
Itâs Asukaâs first time presenting a PowerPoint introduction to TOTO, and despite the occasional sorority phrasingââthe Washlet is, like, a must-haveââshe conveys the facts and figures well enough. The worldâs biggest toilet manufacturer was founded in 1917, when a man called Kazuchika Okura, then working for a ceramics company, thought it might be a good idea to manufacture toilet bowls. It was not the mostobvious business plan. As Asuka puts it, âback then, the sanitation environment was terrible here in Japan. We only had wooden toilet bowls.â In truth, they didnât have toilet bowls at all, because squatting toilets didnât have any. Nonetheless, according to the official TOTO historyâas told in a comic strip that Asuka gives me, this being
manga
-mad JapanâMr. Okura expressed his desire, in somewhat stilted English, to âresearch how to mass-produce sanitary-ware, which are large ceramic items.â
Progress in selling large ceramic items was slow at first. Then came the Second World War, which left Japan with a damaged infrastructure and planners determined to build superior housing connected to sewers. This wasnât a new concept: the Osaka Sewerage Science Museum shows a diorama featuring Lord Hideoshi, a shogun who installed a sewer at Osaka Castle four hundred years ago. With little thought for chronology, Lord Hideoshi is joined in the diorama by a bowler-hatted Scotsman called William Bartonâvoiced by an American who learned Scottish from
Star Trek
âwho worked in Tokyo Universityâs engineering department and introduced Japan to waterborne sewerage. Still, by the end of the Second World War, only a tiny proportion of the country was sewered.
American forces stationed in Japan, accustomed to flush toilets at home, pushed for the same to be installed in the nation they were occupying. TOTOâs toilet bowls sold increasingly over the next forty years, and by 1977, more Japanese were sitting than squatting. This cultural change was not without difficulties. The writer Yoko Mure, in a contribution to
Toilet Ho!
, a collection of essays about Japanese toilet
I arrange to visit the TOTO Technical Center in Tokyo. It is a low, sleek building, oddly located in a residential street in an ordinary eastern suburb which has a mom-and-pop hardware shop on the main street, no neon, and no visible foreigners. The Technical Center is described as a place âwhere architects come to get ideas about designs.â It is a show-and-copy emporium, big, spotless, and empty of people or architects. Sample bathroom sets gleam in the distance; a row of toilets automatically lift their lids as I walk past, in a ceramic greeting ceremony. Photographs are forbidden, leading me to wonder what an architect whoâs no good at sketching is supposed to do. But the toilet industry in Japan is a highly competitive business, and the top threeâTOTO, Inax, and Matsushitaâkeep their secrets close. My requests to visit TOTOâs product development laboratories were politely refused.
My guide is a young woman called Asuka. She works in TOTOâs investor relations department and has probably been instructed to deal with me because she went to school in the United States for a few years and speaks near-perfect Valley Girl. Perhaps Iâve met too many engineers, but she doesnât seem like someone who would work in this industry. When she sees a World Toilet Organization sticker on my glasses case, she says âon Gucci!â with genuine distaste. She later confesses that, actually, sheâd rather be marketing cosmetics. She says TOTO is a good employer, though Iâm disappointed to discover that rumors of certain employee perks are unfounded. They do not get free toilets.
Itâs Asukaâs first time presenting a PowerPoint introduction to TOTO, and despite the occasional sorority phrasingââthe Washlet is, like, a must-haveââshe conveys the facts and figures well enough. The worldâs biggest toilet manufacturer was founded in 1917, when a man called Kazuchika Okura, then working for a ceramics company, thought it might be a good idea to manufacture toilet bowls. It was not the mostobvious business plan. As Asuka puts it, âback then, the sanitation environment was terrible here in Japan. We only had wooden toilet bowls.â In truth, they didnât have toilet bowls at all, because squatting toilets didnât have any. Nonetheless, according to the official TOTO historyâas told in a comic strip that Asuka gives me, this being
manga
-mad JapanâMr. Okura expressed his desire, in somewhat stilted English, to âresearch how to mass-produce sanitary-ware, which are large ceramic items.â
Progress in selling large ceramic items was slow at first. Then came the Second World War, which left Japan with a damaged infrastructure and planners determined to build superior housing connected to sewers. This wasnât a new concept: the Osaka Sewerage Science Museum shows a diorama featuring Lord Hideoshi, a shogun who installed a sewer at Osaka Castle four hundred years ago. With little thought for chronology, Lord Hideoshi is joined in the diorama by a bowler-hatted Scotsman called William Bartonâvoiced by an American who learned Scottish from
Star Trek
âwho worked in Tokyo Universityâs engineering department and introduced Japan to waterborne sewerage. Still, by the end of the Second World War, only a tiny proportion of the country was sewered.
American forces stationed in Japan, accustomed to flush toilets at home, pushed for the same to be installed in the nation they were occupying. TOTOâs toilet bowls sold increasingly over the next forty years, and by 1977, more Japanese were sitting than squatting. This cultural change was not without difficulties. The writer Yoko Mure, in a contribution to
Toilet Ho!
, a collection of essays about Japanese toilet
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