#Toilette

You’ll find the Tōtō Toilet Museum on the factory grounds at Tōtō’s headquarters in Kokura. Tōtō is the market leader for toilets and washlets in Japan. The name doesn’t actually come from the word toilet, but from their original company name Tōyō Tōki (Eastern Ceramics).

To kick things off, you get to watch an introductory film in English. After that, you can check out the company’s over 100-year history in the museum; they originally made tableware alongside sanitary ceramics. There’s loads to discover, from the sit-down toilet that Tōtō introduced to Japan, to the washlets, and even various other gadgets and oddities like the Toilet Bike. To finish up, you absolutely have to pay a visit to the museum’s own loo.

You can get to the museum from Kokura station on foot or by bus. Entry is free. You can use your own smartphone as an audio guide, and there’s free Wi-Fi available in the museum. Taking photos is mostly allowed. They only ask you not to take pictures of a few exhibits out of worry over industrial espionage. Naturally, we stuck to the rules.

The museum is really entertaining and well worth a little detour.

Let’s talk about doing our business! Everyone’s probably heard somewhere that Japanese toilets are a very special kind of tech gadget. And it’s actually true. In every hotel, from cheap to posh, we found electric toilet seats, the so-called Washlets.

A heated loo seat is pretty much the bare minimum nowadays. On top of that, there are various water jets to clean your nether regions, with adjustable spray strength and water temperature of course, plus a warm air blower to dry you off. The current generation has a separate wall panel, letting you remotely trigger the features and flush at the push of a button. The latest craze is the toilet lid opening at the push of a button, or even automatically as soon as you step into the cubicle.

A really popular feature, especially with women, is the Oto-hime, the Sound Princess. It simulates the sound of a flushing loo and reliably masks other, not-so-polite noises that might happen while you’re using it, all while saving water.

Using a Washlet can be a bit of a challenge for a tourist, since the buttons are labelled in Japanese. Some modern Washlets don’t even have a mechanical flush lever anymore. Then the adventure begins of finding the right button to flush away the results of your sitting. On the panel pictured, it’s not the obvious big buttons, but the three narrow ones on the top edge. The button on the left is for a number two, the one in the middle for a number one, and the right one just does an eco-flush. A small comfort is that the Washlet manufacturers recently agreed on standard symbols.

Public loos aren’t equipped with that level of comfort. Alongside the western sitting toilet (“Western Style”), you’ll often find the totally classic squat toilet (“Japanese Style”) available as an alternative. What’s really handy is that you can find a public loo nearby almost everywhere, and the vast majority of the time they’re actually in a really clean state.

Guys can’t be shy in Japan, by the way. Some public loos offer a pretty clear view of the urinals from the outside. On the Shinkansen, the urinal is behind a door that can’t be locked from the inside. But that’s not really needed anyway. Through a big window, you can easily see from the outside if the little boys’ room is currently in use.

Anyway: Japanese Washlets might be a gimmick and a luxury. But a luxury you can get used to pretty quickly… 😁