FUKUOKA -- Japan's unique bidet and bottom-cleaning toilet seats have long mostly been confined to their home archipelago, after failing to make a splash overseas. However, these days sales of Toto Ltd.'s "Washlet" toilet seats are warming up in the United States and China. So why has the tide turned?

       "Oh, my God!" Lewis Clareburt, a New Zealand swimmer at the Tokyo Olympics, uploaded a video to TikTok of himself checking a toilet seat at his accommodation. He was surprised by the water coming out of the little nozzle that had emerged from just beneath the seat, and shouted joyfully with his teammates.

       USA Today's Alex Ptachick, who was in Japan to cover the Games, posted on Twitter about her bathroom experience at Tokyo's Haneda Airport. She wrote that she "was shook" by the machine, which make the sound of running water to conceal the auditory evidence of one's bathroom business.

       A movable toilet is seen in central London on Oct. 13, 2018. During the day, these toilets are kept under the pavement, and at night, they are raised by water pressure. They are said to have been introduced because of rising outdoor urination due to the dominance of pay public toilets. (Mainichi/Kohei Misawa)

       "The coolest thing about Tokyo so far... (is) the toilets," she wrote, and posted a photo. There were many "welcome" replies posted by Japanese people saying that such toilets are a normal sight here, and that she might also come across a toilet that lifts its lid automatically at her approach.

       "Washlet" is a Toto trademark, and the generic name for the machines -- including competitor Lixil Corp.'s "Shower Toilets" -- is "warm-water bidet toilet seat." According to the Cabinet Office's Consumer Confidence Survey, the seats have gone from a market penetration of about 14% in 1992 to 80.2% in 2020. They are now indispensable to Japan's bottoms.

       Meanwhile, Japanese manufacturers have had less success overseas, even in the United States and China -- Toto's major target markets -- where penetration rates hover around 10% and 5%, respectively.

       The seat was originally a medical device made in the U.S. for people with hemorrhoids. Toto predecessor Toyo Toki Co. began importing them in the 1960s, but switched to in-house development after a slew of malfunctions. It released the first Washlet in 1980. Since then, it has slowly boosted the feature set, adding water spray temperature control, spray angle control, automatic nozzle cleaning, and toilet lids and seats that rise and fall automatically when a person comes close to or leaves the machine.

       This photo shows a toilet in a hotel in a business district in Frankfurt, Germany, on Oct. 25, 2017. Toilet seats with bidet functions are rarely seen in Europe. (Mainichi/Kohei Misawa)

       In 2012, the Washlet was recognized as a Mechanical Engineering Heritage by the Japan Society of Mechanical Engineers, which aims to preserve historical machinery for future generations.

       So why haven't the innovations freshening Japan's bottoms been accepted overseas?

       There apparently are various reasons, but in the U.S., toilet topics in general tend to be avoided in public, making the super toilet seats difficult to market. In Europe, where earthquakes are rare, centuries-old buildings remain lived and worked in, and it takes a lot of time and money to install the wiring and electrical socket to plug in a bidet toilet seat. Furthermore, Europe's often hard water creates breakdown risks, and long-established local manufacturers have a strong grip on the market, making it difficult to break into.

       But something unusual has occurred in the U.S. market. Last fiscal year's sales volume increased by 80% over the previous year, and Toto President Noriaki Kiyota feels that Washlets have "finally reached the beginning of popularity."

       One of the reasons behind the rapid sales increase is the serious shortage of paper caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. In the U.S., lockdowns and other measures in spring 2020 severely restricted people from going out, and there was a widespread rush to buy up daily necessities. Toilet paper was in short supply in many places. This is where the Washlet began to shine, and people began to say, "It saves paper and it's hygienic."

       The fact that the company had prepared a sales structure was also a contributing factor. Since most of their customers in the U.S. were wealthy, Toto had not actively sold the seats online for fear of damaging their brand image, but in around 2017, the firm started selling its products on Amazon. Toto had also been working to improve its business structure to meet the increasing demand, such as leveraging Christmas sales and growing its roster of client construction companies. Online reviews praising the seats' ease of use also boosted their reputation and thus sales.

       Washlets are lined up at a Toto dealer in Beijing on July 30, 2021. Sales are steadily increasing in China, where economic growth continues. (Mainichi/Yoshinori Ogura)

       The Chinese market is also doing well. Supported by the surge of economic activity that followed the country's successful containment of the coronavirus, sales in fiscal 2020 increased 4% from the previous year to 69.5 billion yen (about $629 million).

       President Kiyota said he believed that "the wealthy people we are targeting are also emerging in medium-sized cities, so consumption will definitely expand in the future."

       In other Asian countries, however, due to pandemic-induced economic stagnation, construction of facilities where Washlets will be installed has been delayed, pushing back delivery dates.

       Using the two major markets of the U.S. and China as footholds, Toto is determined to aggressively promote Washlets overseas. In its mid-term management plan released in April, the company stated it is aiming to increase sales by about 20% to 690 billion yen (about $6.2 billion) in fiscal 2023 from about 580 billion yen in fiscal 2020, when the pandemic hit the world. To achieve this, it is essential to expand to overseas markets, and the company aims to increase sales in the U.S. and China by more than 1.4 times each in fiscal 2023 compared to fiscal 2020.

       In addition, Toto is planning to introduce a "wellness toilet" that uses information and communication technology to support health management. This is a "dream toilet" that can check your health condition by smelling your waste when you sit on the seat, and can even send you advice on your diet via a dedicated app. It will be interesting to see if the technology of Japan, a country engaged in unstoppable toilet evolution, will spread across the ocean.

       (Japanese original by Yoshihiro Takahashi, Fukuoka Business News Department)

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