Japanese Toilets: Honoured to Accept Your Waste

Western people are growing accustomed to an increasing number of electric or automatic gadgets. Things like rubbish bins with automatically opening lids, garage doors and automatic reverse packing in cars are just a few examples.

However, even for us western people, the concept of an electric or automatic toilet can be a bit of a novelty or perhaps quirky and even taboo for some. At any rate, I thought I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to take some photos of one of these toilets.

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The bowl itself is nothing special but all of the interesting stuff is built in to the seat and lid. Normally, when the toilet lid is closed when you approach it but when you get close enough it will open up. The seat is also warmed so there is none of that “cold seat shock”.

You’ll also notice the black rectangle on the hinge which does all of the detection work.

There is also a control panel mounted on the wall with this model with the top of it used for flushing, close the seat and lid, opening the lid and opening the seat (in that order).

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The front surface of the control panel also contains buttons for turning off the unit, controlling water pressure (low or high), activating the bidet and toggling the seat warmer (I didn’t try any of them though). My Katakana reading skills are pretty rusty but there also seems to be a massage button on the front.

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If you ever visit Japan (and even some other Asian countries such as Singapore) you’ll find plenty of toilets similar to this one in hotels but some may have the controls on an arm built into the toilet. We probably won’t see many of these in Australia any time soon but for many of us it might just be one of those odd things that capture our curiosity.

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