Everybody loves to sit on one – so why isn’t the Japanese toilet more popular?
"We are like kids exploring a cruise ship," one colleague said as we scurried around Bracken House, the Financial Times' London headquarters, to which we have merely returned after 30 years.
Apart from the original archway, intact simply now out of use, the edifice is transformed, with various exciting new features from a roof-pinnacle garden to a multi-faith prayer room. And dotted around the edifice – with the encouragement, nosotros assume, of Nikkei, our owners – are several Japanese toilets.
If you travel to Japan, you volition know these. Toto, the market-leading manufacturer, calls them electronic toilet-bidets. You lot can warm the seat with the touch of a button, and a control console activates h2o-jet cleaning and drying.
READ: Ode to the glorious Japanese toilet
If you lot travel exterior Japan, you also know that Japanese toilets don't travel much. Y'all detect them in some luxury hotels elsewhere. The but one I have seen was in a loftier-end Shanghai institution where I had joined our correspondent for a beverage. My colleague Lucy Kellaway came beyond one recently when she stayed in the penthouse suite at the London Mandarin Oriental.
The paucity of Japanese toilets elsewhere is not for want of trying. Toto ready its offset overseas joint venture in Indonesia in 1977. Yet about 3-quarters of the company'southward 2022 sales were in Japan. China deemed for 52 per cent of its exports, the residuum of Asia 23 per cent and the Americas 22 per cent. Just three per cent of its foreign sales were in Europe.
Many Japanese innovations – from the Toyota Prius to the selfie stick – accept achieved worldwide penetration. Why not the Japanese toilet? In search of answers, I went to Toto Europe's London shop, where I spoke to Asuka Osada, the marketing and corporate strategy manager.
She showed me the top-of-the-range Neorest toilet, which lifts its lid as yous approach. It tin store two users' favourite settings, so that it knows, for case, your preferred water pressure. The Neorest retails for £12,000 (S$20,970).
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We likewise looked at the Toto Washlet, the company's entry-level toilet, which is the one nosotros have at Bracken House. You have to lift the lid yourself, but it has the heating, spraying and drying controls, and will set y'all back £ii,100.
Toto has sold 50m Washlets since their launch in 1980 and almost Japanese homes take one. Why don't other countries? During my chat with Osada, I could spot three reasons, which we can call the three Cs.
The starting time is cost. Even the basic version is more than western householders expect to spend on a toilet, but given how much money the amend-off lavish on their bathrooms, you would think more would go for a technologically advanced loo.
The second C is culture. Every bit Osada explained, there are wipe cultures and launder cultures. People don't switch easily. The third C is current. Japanese toilets take to be plugged into a socket and the received wisdom in the United kingdom of great britain and northern ireland and many other countries is that electricity and h2o don't mix, although Osada said that all Toto's connections are waterproof.
In Japan, she said, tech toilets began in the dwelling and spread to offices and schools as people expected them there. The Toto strategy for overseas markets is to brainstorm with hotels and hope users so want them at domicile.
In an interview last year with the Nikkei Asian Review, Madoka Kitamura, Toto'due south president, said he hoped visitors to Nippon would buy the toilets on their return home. The Japanese government's aim of attracting 30m tourists a year "provides us", he said, rather marvellously, "with a tail air current".
At Bracken Business firm we're convinced, although I don't know whatever colleagues with a plan, or the budget, to install them at dwelling.
By Michael Skapinker © 2022 The Fiscal Times
Source: https://cnalifestyle.channelnewsasia.com/entertainment/japanese-toilets-popular-225681
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