Japanese Toilets: The Future Called 30 Years Ago

After using the toilet, do you wash your hands, or just wipe them?<p>You&#x27;ve just demonstrated why washing toilets are superior. I cannot understand our misplaced, hollow pride in not adopting something which simply works better. I&#x27;ve even heard some especially crazy people try to say the japanese toilets are &quot;perverted&quot; - the hold tradition has on some people is just insane.<p>Japanese toilets are simply better. For some bizarre reason we&#x27;ve resisted adopting them here. It boggles the mind.

I find health faucets <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bidet_shower" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Bidet_shower</a> quite effective, except that one time it went terribly wrong.<p>These are essentially telephone showers installed next to the toilet. You switch them on using a valve&#x2F;trigger and then manually direct the fire. Simple, cheap and no fuss.<p>This little guy, however, turned out to be a closet fire hose. It pretty much went from 0 to 1000 gallons per sec in an instant and just wouldn&#x27;t let up, the valve was stuck. The extension cord was twisting and coiling around like crazy with the released pressure, the shower head was going at full blast in my hand, initially directed at my rear, it was continuously pushing my hand away from anything that I was trying to point it to, it give me a visceral understanding of how jet engines work.<p>Working out a sequence of operations in my head to get out of such a situation while caught in a compromised and inflexible position, with only one hand free, was quite a challenge. I am not quite sure if I should be thankful that it wasnt autonomously powered and directed.<p>My first Japanese toilet experience happened @ Google (I was interning there at that time). When the water touched the derriere, it made me flinch and jump with surprise, as I wasnt quite sure what to expect, this was several years ago and Japanese toilets were still an unfamiliar opbject to me. And it really tickles the shit out of you ! (no pun intended) I guess there are ways to choose between a laminar and degrees of non laminar flow (all those controls must be for something), I would expect the former to be somewhat less flinch inducing.

This is one of those things that long-time expats that live in Japan often take back with them when they leave. Another is the practice of removing your (utterly filthy, inevitably) outdoor shoes when you enter the house.<p>I read Shogun as a kid (great book, for a little kid) and going back home to the USA and using the toilet there always reminds me of the scenes where the European sailors that shipwrecked in Japan sit around scratching their fleas and scoffing at the Japs&#x27; grotesque habit of bathing every day... <i>gross</i>

When I first came to Thailand, I was appalled when one of my friends told me the pistol nozzle (like we use in the US for doing dishes) next to every Thai toilet[1] was for spraying yourself after using the bathroom.<p>This was disgusting to me at first.<p>Echoing a few other comments, I feel like a bidet is something you have to experience yourself before you trust it. Once you do though, I think you are forever changed.<p>On my last trip back to the states, I remember feeling perpetually disgusted that all I had to clean myself with was paper. It&#x27;s disgusting - barbaric even... you&#x27;re just smearing waste all over yourself.<p>If you don&#x27;t feel like spending the money to install a Japanese bidet, a Thai &quot;bum gun&quot; might be a more wallet-friendly option.<p>[1] - <a href="http://thatluckyboy.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/bum_gun_tribute1.jpg" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;thatluckyboy.com&#x2F;wp-content&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;2013&#x2F;05&#x2F;bum_gun_t...</a>

One thing I haven&#x27;t really understood is why exactly is a Indian toilet seat seen as inferior to the English toilet seat.<p>- True that the English seat occupies less space, but its adoption has not always been based on space savings.<p>- True that sitting appears more gentleman like, rather than sitting half subtended in air, but hey who is watching?<p>- True that elderly find the english version easier to use because of the supporting nature of the seat, but its not a hard rule. A hybrid of both (Anglo-Indian) seat is more suited to them, and ailing patients.<p>- The Indian version is more hygienic, as no part of your body directly touches any part of the seat. Besides superior genital cleanliness over time due to wider leg positions.<p>- The Indian version is decisively easier to clean&#x2F;maintain compared to the English version.<p>- Moreover the Indian version, is more suited to over-weight people than a English version.<p>- And relatively, due to its production in labor intensive market such as India&#x2F;China, the Indian version is cost-efficient, suited for developing nations, who still have a fairly large population that needs proper sanitation structures.

Another thing that gets overlooked is the built-in faucet at the top to rinse off hands such that every tank of water gets used twice:<p><a href="http://demenglog.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/toilet-seat-topcimg0688--large--my-japan-blog-pwtuo0c4.jpg" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;demenglog.com&#x2F;wp-content&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;2014&#x2F;01&#x2F;toilet-seat-...</a>

If you&#x27;re thinking about buying one of these, I can highly recommend the Toto S300e (<a href="http://www.amazon.com/dp/B009IJ2LM4" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;dp&#x2F;B009IJ2LM4</a>) or, if you live in Asia, the TCF4722CS (<a href="http://item.taobao.com/item.htm?id=23047236820" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;item.taobao.com&#x2F;item.htm?id=23047236820</a>).<p>These &#x27;washlet&#x27; toilet seats can be retro-fitted to normal toilets. It&#x27;s really easy as long as the flush-water inlet to your toilet has a standard fitting. Oh, and assuming you have a suitable power socket near the toilet. The manual recommends a GFCI (ground fault circuit interrupter) socket.

I remember my first visit to a Japanese toilet. I noticed all the buttons after I finished my business and stood up.<p><i>Wow! What do these do?</i> I bent over the toilet bowl and pushed a button at random...

I was about to sleep but definitely had to add my contribution to bum washing. Most Indian toilets have a water faucet next to your seat. You always wash with water using your left hand(Right one is reserved for more auspicious occasions like eating food or shaking hands). I still remember the horror of my first trip to US and finding that you have to use rough sheets of paper to essentially scrath it off. But on the flip side, toilets in India are always damp and dirty with filthy cess pools of mold and .... God help you if you ever have to use a public toilet in India.

You will probably hate me for giving some graphic details but I had never used Toilet paper for the first 21 years of my life.(I am 22 BTW). I didn&#x27;t even use a bidet. Just my left hand and water. I know this might be considered very disgusting but it is very common from where I am.

<i>Sorry to sound &#x27;negative&#x27;, but...</i><p>I don&#x27;t know if this is the way the future is going to pan out - water is an increasingly scarce resource and, as it is, we waste a gallon or so of water to lift one&#x27;s leavings up and over the u-bend.<p>Of all people Bill Gates is probably the expert on what toilets will really be like in the future, allegedly water, toilets, sanitation and health is something he is most interested in.<p>Personally, although I am not into &#x27;standing desks&#x27; I am into &#x27;standing toilets&#x27;, as in the humble urinal. One&#x27;s aim is easier and there is no seat to remember to put down for the next user. Less water is wasted. I would want one at home so as to avoid &#x27;female complaints&#x27; regarding the state of things. Ideally the outflow from the adjacent sink would keep it clean so water wastage really would be minimal. It would be in a room of its own, a very small room with no need for anyone female to ever enter it.<p>I recently replaced an extractor fan in a bathroom. I thought that a quiet fan would be preferable and I was disappointed with the noise made. However, then I realised the real purpose of the fan, it is to make noise to disguise the sound of one leaving one&#x27;s leavings. I believe that the Japanese toilets have some of this functionality too. Can anyone confirm that?

In the spirit of too much information that is this thread. I was given a lavette bottle after giving birth, and I&#x27;ve continued using it quite often.<p><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Lavette-Bottle-Perineal-Irrigation-DYND70125H/dp/B000VSXSX2/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;Lavette-Bottle-Perineal-Irrigation-DYN...</a><p>It&#x27;s an even cheaper alternative to the cold water attachment, it&#x27;s portable, and you can fill it with warm water.

Japanese (and increasingly Korean) toilets are amazing. I love visiting my in-laws and just using their toilets and feeling unbelievably civilized.<p>My wife, refuses to get one, or even the fancy seat attachments because...tbh...they&#x27;re freaking expensive. I can basically refit all the toilets in my house for less than the discount price for a single seat...and that&#x27;s not including the cost of the electrician to put a power source near just one of my toilets.<p>There&#x27;s also lots of research in her home country that women shouldn&#x27;t use the bidets in these toilets for various reasons particular to their anatomy.<p>To compare, a Glacier Bay 2-piece high efficiency dual flush elongated toilet is &lt;$100 at my local home depot.<p>Toto Washlet S350e seat with heated seat and warm water bidet is $1,700. I frequently see cheaper Korean versions at my local Asian Market for $800-1200. I saw one at Costco for $650 the other day.<p>If they want to penetrate the market, they need to drop the price significantly, corner the market, then start cranking the price up faster than inflation.

In case anyone was curious, ビデ is read as &quot;bidet&quot; (i.e. squirt water up your ass).<p>This among the many reasons why it&#x27;s helpful to at least learn to read kana before visiting, as it makes a lot of things easier--there are an awful lot of English words written in kana that you can decipher (well, French in this particular case, but you get the point I hope).

Maybe the hold traditional toilets have on us is another example of the triumph of &quot;worse is better.&quot;<p>Whatever else you want to say about them, they are closer to the UNIX tradition than Japanese toilets.

Japanese baths are great, too - you can wash your body before getting into the tub, so you&#x27;re not stewing in your own filth.

Toto makes <i>travel washlets</i>. Imagining travel without one is like trying to remember how we used to code before Google and Stackoverflow: yes we did it, for sure, but I just can&#x27;t fathom how. It&#x27;s also a relatively cheap and easy way to get acquianted with this nice facet of civilization. There are other travel washlets, not made by Toto, skip those. Search eBay for toto travel washlet, less than $100 shipped.<p>I had a particularly bad day at a London client onsite and out of sheer desperation Googled for travel washlet (I have one normal at home and was missing it badly), not that I had any idea how you would even construct one but lo and behold, there it is.

Make sure you flush before you hit the &quot;blow hot air&quot; button. :&#x2F;

I wonder what the effect on overall hygiene is? I wash my hands after every bowl movement, in total (shower, etc) I wash them every 5 hours. Will people now wash their hands less?

The future? What about the past?<p>Washing your butt so it&#x27;s clean = yeah, that&#x27;s pretty cool.<p>Eating the right food (and being lucky to have good digestion) so that normally the paper you wipe with comes up white = priceless.<p>Of course you&#x27;ll have to wash your hands, but still, we&#x27;re not hardwired to make a mess every time we defecate. Maybe you could say that&#x27;s excessive smoke indicating the engine isn&#x27;t running right. Japanese toilets aren&#x27;t a fix, they&#x27;re a workaround.

By the way &quot;bidet&quot; is a french word in the first place and it has nothing to do with washing your arse :) Bidets are small bathtubs-shaped vessels where you actually wash your feet. The reason they existed is because in the past people didn&#x27;t wash their whole body every single day, and instead they cleaned at least the most dirty &#x2F; odorant parts of their bodies this way, more often.

FWIW this was one of the &#x27;tour questions&#x27; on Google which had (at least when I was there) several bathrooms equipped with washlets. It really is a nice thing, and one of the engineers put a WattsUp meter on one to see if it was wasting power (answer quite economical). Of course in California using water to wash yourself in a drought is probably the wrong thing to do ...

I tried, liked and missed Japanese toilets. I certainly wasn&#x27;t going to be installing a $1000 Toto in my house, but I waited too long to take a chance on a cheap bidet. For &lt;$50 you can get a bidet on Amazon which, though little more than a valve and a spout, works pretty well.

Questions, I couldn&#x27;t find an answer to:<p>How do you make sure that the water doesn&#x27;t merely distribute your feces all over your butt?<p>How do women prevent that feces get sprayed onto or even into their vagina, since the water seems to be coming from the rear side of the toilet?

On reading that it seems like you use paper still. I didnt realise this. Do you use the normal paper before or after the water? Seems like after water and drying to me, but potentially much less?<p>Also, does it do away with the need for women wiping after a pee?

Never been to Japan, but from description its the same type of toilets they have in South Korea. Yeah, feel much cleaner, I wonder how is it hard to get same setup in US

This guy uses the bidet before wiping? Whenever I&#x27;m in Japan I wipe before bidet, that way at least the initial blast of water doesn&#x27;t spread too much gunk.

The most important thing to make Japanese office life happy is to provide a latest Japanese toilets. They do care about it a lot!

I have one. I&#x27;ll never go back.

&quot;disinterested&quot;<p>&gt;:(