The Royal Flush - Japanese Toilet Technology

The 21st century doesn't look anything like I envisioned it would years ago. And when I say "I," I mean of course Hanna-Barbara, creators of The Jetsons. Where are the flying cars, the moving sidewalks, the in-home robot maids? It is precisely the lack of these 21st century comforts that makes this century suspiciously reminiscent of the 20th century, those frontier days when we were expected to walk from one part of the house to another, when we washed our own laundry and cooked our own food, a time void of futuristic technological luxuries.

It is exactly this void that Japanese toilet engineers are hard at work, trying to fill. In fact, many Japanese are currently sitting on toilets that make our white porcelain bowls look like something from the 1950's.

At this very moment, somewhere in night-shrouded Japan, a bran-fed Japanese insomniac is greeted with a glow-in-the-dark can that senses his very presence and automatically raises its lid in welcome. Furthermore, this toilet of the future offers our hypothetical somnambulant a range of highly laxative musical selections to choose from, "including chirping birds, rushing water, tinkling wind chimes, or the strumming of a traditional Japanese Harp," as an auditory aid for his after-hours transaction.

Sure, here in the West we achieve a similar effect using a night light and a portable radio. But Japanese toilet manufacturer Matsushita (literally, "under a pine tree") takes bathroom technology a step further with a bowl equipped with a variable temperature jet-spray designed to give its user a pleasurable and cleansing buttocks-wash and massage.

A pleasurable buttocks-wash and massage.

This pretty much explains Japan's low instance of colon cancer and hemorrhoids, not to mention the comparable non-existence of violent crime in that country. No wonder they're always smiling. I'd be pretty happy, too, with a nice warm-water rump massage whenever I, uh… clean the tuba. Follow this up with a hot-air blow-dry and augment it with a heated seat in the winter, and it's easy to see why the Japanese are walking around with big grins on their faces and the future's toilet in their homes. Such toilets are now in nearly half the homes in Japan.

No way could we have toilets like that in this country. It would ruin us! Can you imagine the time we'd spend in the john? Nothing would ever get done. And our time in public restrooms would increase dramatically, creating yet unimaginable lines at intermission and/or halftime.

Leave it to the Japanese and their love affair with electronic gadgetry to bring the Internet Age into the bathroom. Hell, the Japanese were kimono shopping on eBay years before Al Gore even conceived of the Internet.

Not all of these contemporary cans are so superfluously hedonistic. Japanese lavatory engineers, in an effort to put the physician back in the bowl, have devised medical toilets such as Toto's "WellyouII," which "automatically measures the user's urine sugar levels by making a collection with a little spoon held by a retractable, mechanical arm."

This, of course, begs the question: What kind of psychopath would sit naked on a device that gives a robotic arm full access to your most vulnerable bodily areas?? But the average Japanese citizen will shell out $2000 to $4000 for just such an experience.

Yet another medical toilet actually has electrodes built into the seat, which send a "mild electrical charge" into the user's buttocks, somehow yielding a highly accurate body-fat measurement.

A "mild electrical charge" into the user's buttocks…

Future developments in such toilet technology will make the torture devices of the Middle Ages look like a pampering butt-wash I'm sure, and there's no doubt that they will sell like marshmallows at a witch-burning. Before too long, it'll be impossible to find a toilet that isn't equipped with some sort of medieval instrument of discomfort.

Me? I'm holding out for thumbscrews.