King for A Day

By Michael Walsh

The fancy showroom is a sensory delight. Soft blue light dances gently around a pool of water on the floor, and delicate sounds of synthesizer music fill the air. On the gray tile wall, ten video screens display soothing images of running streams and ocean waves. Shoppers at the INAX Corp. showroom are delighted: "Suteki ((lovely))," murmurs Tokyo housewife Masako Yakou, happily browsing past rows and rows of shiny new . . . well, er, facilities. Gushes Yakou: "I love toilets."

So do many citizens of Japan, where personal hygiene is paramount and high technology extends into just about every sphere of daily life. This combination has produced the enthronement of the bathroom as a focus for ingenuity and decorating style. "The Japanese have given up hopes of having a garden, and are spending money for comfortable dwellings," says sociologist Yukio Akatsuka. "The interest is now shifting from the living room to the bathroom." Though the seatless holes in the ground of stereotypical Western dread still exist in many parts of Japan, the newfangled WC is often a marvel of gadgetry.

Consider, for example, the Washlet, a technological wonder that takes the guesswork out of cleaning up. A kind of toilet bowl-cum-bidet, the Washlet sprays a water jet, then dries with a blast of warm air. For added comfort, the seat is heated. It even has a safety device: to prevent the mechanically inquisitive from being sprayed in the face, the water nozzle will not work until a sensor registers the presence of a seat upon the seat. The fruit of a two-year survey of the Japanese anatomy -- in search of the perfect angle for the water nozzle -- the Washlet is being aggressively marketed by its manufacturer, TOTO, Japan's largest maker of toilets. Promise the ads: "Your bottom will like it after three tries."

A hit when it was introduced in 1980, Washlets or similar brands of washing toilets have found their way into 1 out of 8 Japanese homes, according to TOTO. The latest model, called the Washlet Queen, includes a built-in deodorizer, a hand-held wireless remote control to activate front and back sprinklers, and a heater. For the particularly diffident, who hesitate to visit a showroom, TOTO offers a list of 28 shops and restaurants around Tokyo that have Washlets.

The hardware gets more impressive every day. There are toilets with vinyl seat covers that can rotate after each use, perfect for a country in which 1 out of 5 women refuses to use a Western-style toilet outside the home. For ladies who do not want to waste water but wish to maintain decorum -- according to TOTO's investigations, women flush an average of 2.5 times per visit to drown out potentially embarrassing or offensive noises -- there is the Oto Hime (Sound Princess), which plays a recording of flushing water. "We want to change the toilet from a space that one wants to do without to a space where one can relax," says Fujita spokesman Kazuyuki Kume.

Even more sophisticated loos are on the way. TOTO is testing one that analyzes urine and reports blood pressure and heartbeat. For the harried commuter who has everything, the Minato Pharmaceutical Co. is marketing the portable Toilet Pot. It consists of a plastic bag that contains a coagulant and is aimed at victims of Tokyo's often intractable traffic jams. For travelers, a two-story suite of rest rooms called the Charm Station opened last spring in Udatsu-cho on Shikoku Island. It boasts six toilets with international motifs, including the Rose of Versailles, which features a white porcelain bowl decorated with pink roses and exuding the flower's fragrance, and the Fin de Siecle in Vienna, which offers a rococo bowl and whiffs of lavender. The builders, the Golden Tower Corp., hope to turn a profit on the $4 million project in about four years. So far, up to 2,000 visitors a day have flooded in.

The Japanese, unlike most Westerners, are not squeamish about discussing toilet habits. Professor Hideo Nishioka, chairman of the 100-member Japan Toilet Association, a private study group, has calculated that Japanese men spend an average of 31.7 seconds in the john compared with 1 minute 33 seconds for women. As if that were not evidence enough of the country's efficiency, Professor Nishioka has another statistic that illustrates Japanese competitiveness: every day, Japan uses enough toilet paper to circle the earth tenfold.

With reporting by Kumiko Makihara/Tokyo