The Big Necessity (9 page)

Then came the advertising. In 1982, Japanese television audiences were treated to the sight of an attractive young woman, her hair and clothes slightly wacky—traditional Japanese wooden shoes, a flouncy dress, hair in bunches—standing next to a toilet and telling viewers that “even though it's a bottom, it wants to be washed, too.” The actress was a singer called Jun Togawa, described to me as a Japanese Cyndi Lauper, and she made her mark. Any Japanese who was sentient in 1982 can probably still recite her catchphrases, which were certainly unlike any others. In another ad, she is shown standing on a fake buttock reading a letter supposedly from her bottom, which writes that “even bottoms have feelings.”

The Inax men sigh. “TOTO had such good ads. Everyone remembers them.” The Inax ads, by contrast, featured a man dressed up in a comedy costume. “It was a gorilla sitting on a toilet bowl. It was supposed to be a true experience.” Until now, my hosts have mostly exuded a quiet gravity. Toilets in Japan are a serious business. But the gorilla cracks their composure. They laugh, partly from bewilderment, as they attempt to explain why using a gorilla to sell a toilet could ever have been a good idea. “We don't know why we had the gorilla,” says Inax's senior communications executive. He has been nodding politely
for most of the meeting, but the gorilla story unearths a lovely giggle from inside his earnest demeanor. “We can't even remember the slogan. But I do remember that he was wearing dungarees.”

Helped by Japan's economic growth spurt in the 1980s, and by Inax's inept advertising, sales of high-function toilets began a slow, steady climb, but with TOTO in the lead. By 1995, 23 percent of Japanese houses had some kind of Washlet, according to a Cabinet Office survey, and by the end of the next decade, the figure had doubled. Inax has yet to catch up.

The gorilla also failed because the actress hit the right weak spot. TOTO's genius was to address the
wabi sabi
soul of the Japanese consumer.
Wabi sabi
is a cultural and aesthetic philosophy that resists translation, but is usually rendered by the words “simple” or “unfinished.” The Japanese tea ceremony is
wabi sabi
, as are those clean bathing habits. The Washlet wasn't unfinished, nor was it transient, but it purified both the body and the toilet room. The toilet was now inside the house—and sometimes inside the bathroom—but its nozzles and hot air kept the user safely distant from his or her bodily excreta. All that complicated engineering simplified the unpleasant business of going to the toilet. Rick Hayashi of TOTO has a toilet-related definition for
wabi sabi:
“clean, simple, no smell.” The bidet-function toilet removed the need to touch the body with toilet paper. In an increasingly overcrowded urban environment, it provided the means for keeping a distance from bodily functions that before had been achieved by siting the privy far from the house. Also, it had heated seats. It had music. It turned the four K's stinky, dark toilet room into a sliver of pleasant private space, a highly desirable thing to have in the notoriously tiny apartments of Japan's cities.

After five hours of my questions, Mr. Tanaka shyly offers two of his own. “Why don't English people want a high-function toilet? Why is Japan so unique?”

I don't know how to reply. I say something vague about how in the UK and United States, it's generally presumed that plumbing technology has evolved as far as it needs to. It works, it flushes, and that's all that is required. I say I think that's mistaken, but that's the way it is. Mr. Tanaka nods with politeness, but neither of us find my answer
satisfying. I decide to go to the promised land for enlightenment. TOTO and Inax both covet the enormous Chinese market, but what they really want are Americans. U.S. consumers have more wealth and higher levels of technology. In the eyes of the high-function toilet industry, the United States is frontier country, yet to be conquered, persuaded, and bottom-cleansed. I can't yet answer Mr. Tanaka's question, but the land of promise might.

 

TOTO opened its first U.S. office in 1989. Its current premises in New York City are in downtown SoHo, in an expensive-looking building in an expensive location, with an expensive toilet—the latest Neorest—in the window. Somehow, the Neorest is glossy and streamlined enough—it recalls the sleekness of a luxury yacht—to fit in well on this street of designer shops and lofts. The location makes sense because of TOTO USA's business strategy, which is to sell luxury. That's why I'm in SoHo and not Wisconsin (home to Kohler, America's toilet market leader) or New Jersey (home to American Standard, the runner-up).

TOTO USA's PR chief is Lenora Campos. Her manner is assured and her background educated: she holds a Ph.D. in “the representation of clothing theft in early modern Britain” and describes herself as “a failed academic.” Somewhere along the way from academia to the Neorest, she has developed a nice line in euphemism: she describes her job as “working in high-end plumbing” and excrement as “matter.” But she's as sharp as her euphemisms are soft. I have come to her with prejudices. The U.S. market is stagnant. American toilets are ugly. They are the “complex and ridiculous thrones” described by the philosopher Alan Watts, who knew Japan and found Western toilets wanting. Americans aren't interested in innovation, and they don't want Washlets or change.

Campos doesn't bite. TOTO USA isn't only about Washlets. Their regular, non-bidet toilets sell well, though nowhere near Kohler's sales. Campos describes her chosen industry as “very dynamic. It addresses sustainability, the environment, technology, design.” She disagrees with my interpretation of the industry as dull and conservative. There has been innovation, even if it was only in the plumbing. Actually, in recent
history, this has been the industry's only innovation, and one that was forced upon it.

For decades, the average American toilet used a guzzling 3.5 gallons (13 liters) of water in every flush. Some used nearly 5 gallons. By the early 1990s, when several states were reporting water shortages and the concept of water conservation began to take root, it was calculated that the American toilet was using nearly half a household's water supply. In 1992, the Energy Policy Act (EPAct) was passed, requiring all new toilets within two years to flush with no more than six liters, or 1.5 gallons. It was a shock. This was barely enough time to change production lines, let alone reconfigure a toilet design that depended on a set volume of water to function. The resulting modified toilets were rushed and flawed. The six-liter flush had existed in Europe for years, which probably explains its inclusion in the EPAct. If the Europeans can do it, so can Americans. After all, Americans believe that their plumbing is the best in the world (and that Europe's is dreadful); that their sanitary appliances, in the words of the anthropologist Francesca Bray, who taught a class about toilets at the University of San Diego, “are at the top of the evolutionary and civilizational scale.”

But American toilets are nothing like Europe's, and not because they are superior. The American toilet is siphonic, or wash-out. The technology involves complicated principles of air and water flow, but in essence, the U.S. toilet pulls the water out, and the European one pushes it. Manufacturers attempted to make a siphonic flush work with less water by narrowing the pipes, so the siphon effect was increased. It didn't work. Users were having to flush two or three times. There were difficulties with smell. “In retrospect,” a toilet designer tells me, “it was pretty asinine to think they would just adapt.”

In plumbing, the post-EPAct era is still known as the time of clogging. Black markets sprang up in old-style toilets. News crews crossed into Canada to interview Americans smuggling back Canadian 13-liter toilets. These toilet pirates were outraged that not only were they being told how much to flush, but that they were being asked to do it with bad equipment. It offended their plumbing and their pride. One cross-border black marketeer interviewed by CNN fumed that “I never
thought in Vietnam, you know, when I had to go out in the woods at night, I never thought I'd have a problem here in my own country. . . . We have the best life in the world and we can't even get a decent toilet now.” And anyway, if the new toilets had to be flushed several times, where was the water conservation?

In 2001, enough Americans were angry enough to persuade Representative Joe Knollenberg of Michigan to introduce H.R. 1479, the Plumbing Standards Improvement Act. The bill would rescind the low-flow requirements of the EPAct and “get the federal government out of the bathroom.” It was defeated by one vote in committee.

The clogging reputation was hard to shift. Even today, most American toilets will have a plunger nearby, no matter how much American toilet manufacturers protest that they're outdated. When American Standard launched their high-end Champion range of toilets in 2003, its selling point was its powerful flush. Posters in faux Soviet revolutionary style featured plumbers in overalls brandishing wrenches, and the slogan “Working Towards a Clog-Free Nation.”

 

American manufacturers' loss was initially TOTO's gain. TOTO's success in Japan had come through clever advertising and marketing, but it was also due to a brown, gloopy material called
gi ji obutse
, which translates as “fake body waste.” It is, TOTO staff in Japan tell me, “a key part of TOTO,” and so key, the recipe is top secret, though they will reveal that it involves soybean paste.

Soybean paste (miso) is a lethal weapon in the battle for toilet market victory, because toilet makers need to test flushes, and they need test media to do it with. A flush is a chaotic event. Various media bounce around trying to get through one small opening. The more realistic the test media, the closer its properties—buoyancy, density—to human feces, the better the flush. Toilet engineers have always known this: when George Jennings's Pedestal Vase won a gold medal at a Health Exhibition in 1884, it successfully flushed ten apples, one flat sponge, three “air vessels” (crumpled paper), as well as cleaning the “plumber's smudge” smeared on the toilet bowl surface.

By the time EPAct came into force, American manufacturers had barely progressed from the apples. They worked with golf balls, sponges, or wiggly bits of plastic. TOTO, though, had been working with a realistic test media for over eighty years. When the National Association of Home Builders (NAHB) published a survey in 2002 testing toilets for flush performance, TOTO models were ranked first, second, and third. This helped TOTO's reputation and sales: since 2003, annual U.S. sales have doubled (from 14.4 billion yen to 30.1 billion or $257 million). TOTO won't release sales figures—beyond saying unhelpfully that the company is “the recognized leader in the toilet category,” which would puzzle Kohler—but at least temporarily,
gi ji obutse
helped to give them the flushing edge in a clogged nation.

Suddenly, America's plumbing industry found it had to catch up. Money was put into innovation. In 2002, American Standard had no Ph.D.'s in its R&D department, and now it has five, including an expert in nanotechnology (used to develop antimicrobial coating). But American toilet manufacturers still needed better test media. They couldn't risk clogging when their reputation was already battered in the eyes of a plunger-weary public, and they could hardly offer their toilets for test drives. Luckily, one day, a Canadian named Bill Gauley became suspicious.

 

Gauley is a water engineer by training and curious by nature. By the 1990s, six-liter toilet models had gone on sale after Canadian states brought in water-efficiency rules, but Gauley was skeptical. He did some tests and found that many of the six-liter models were actually using several liters more. When the NAHB report was published in 2002, he read it carefully. The report was supposed to help municipalities choose which toilet models were efficient enough to deserve rebates from the government. Dozens of toilets had been tested using sponges and paper balls as test media, and then rated with scores.

Gauley emailed the NAHB and told them politely that their survey was useless. He said they should have used realistic test media—since when did humans excrete sponges?—and that their scoring system was
flawed. “To their credit,” he tells me, “they said, ‘You sound like you know what you're talking about, so raise the funding and you can test the toilets yourself.' Then I had to put my money where my mouth was.” His first challenge was to find something superior to sponges. He tried potatoes, mashed bananas, flour and water. Nothing floated or flushed the same way that human excrement did. He read that TOTO used soybean paste and asked them for the recipe. When the company refused to reveal it, he asked his colleagues for help. Anyone who went shopping was instructed to “look for anything that might work.” They brought back rice paste and peanut butter, but still Gauley wasn't satisfied. Finally someone brought in a brand of miso that he thought looked and floated right. “Not that we go around feeling human feces, but some of us have kids and it seemed right, for density and moisture content.”

All that remained was to set up a drop guide to guarantee the test media always fell in the same spot. (Gauley did this electronically, rather than enlisting the help of his colleagues' anuses.) Also, he had to calculate the weight of an average deposit. This wasn't easy, as most research focused on unusual diets, but a 1978 study in the gastroenterological journal
Gut
eventually yielded the fact that an average bowel movement weighed 250 grams (roughly half a pound). Then Gauley started testing. Of forty toilets that supposedly conformed to the 6-liter requirement, only half passed. The results were published as the
Maximum Performance (MaP) Testing of Popular Toilet Models
, and shortly afterward, the phone calls began. Some manufacturers were furious. Lawyers were consulted. Gauley was not intimidated. “We'd videotaped every test. So when they came threatening to sue, we'd show them a good performing toilet and they would usually say, ‘You're right. We have to improve our toilets.'” And Gauley had to improve his test media. The soybean paste was the right density and weight, but it was messy, and it wasn't reusable. Then a technician said, “Why don't you just put sand in a condom?” The physical properties of sand are nothing like feces, but the comment gave Gauley an idea. He bought a packet of Lifestyles non-lubricated and returned to the lab. His colleagues were doubtful. “They said, are you sure it's going to be strong
enough?” He filled one with miso and threw it against the wall. It was strong enough.