Free The Big Necessity by Rose George Page A

duck.” Asuka demonstrates the duck glaze properties on a display Neorest in the showroom, marking with a blue pencil both a glazed and unglazed part of the toilet bowl. She looks profoundly unimpressed when the pencil mark is indeed eradicated on the treated area, either because she’s done it before or because it’s not mascara.
    All this technology has come from years of research, billions of yen, many great minds (TOTO has 1,500 engineers), and a visit to a strip club.
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    I persist in asking about the genesis of the Washlet and how it changed Japan, and Rick finally humors me. To sell the Washlet to an unwelcoming public, it had to work properly. The Wash Air Seat and the early Washlet operated mechanically. It took several minutes for the spray to spray and for the water to heat. TOTO solved this by making the workings electronically operated, the spray instant, and the angle perfect. The Washlet nozzle extends and retracts at exactly 43 degrees, a position precisely calibrated to prevent any cleansing water from falling back on the nozzle after doing its job (this is known as “backwash”). Determining the angle was a long, careful process, says Rick. I ask him how the research was done. He says, “Well, we have 20,000 employees,” and stops. I wait for enlightenment.
    Asuka hands me another comic book by way of an answer. It is a 48-page TOTO history published by
Weekly Sankei
magazine in 1985, five years after the company had relaunched the Washlet. Its heroes are Mr. Kawakami, a TOTO engineer, and his portly, cheery colleague, Mr. Ito. Kawakami and Ito are entrusted with improving the Washlet. The nozzle has to be accurate, and to make it so they need to know the average location of the human anus. Facts like this are not easy to find, so they turn to the only source material available, which is anybody onthe company payroll. Their workmates aren’t impressed. “Though we are colleagues,” one says with politeness, “I don’t want you to know my anus position.”
    Kawakami and Ito prevail by performing the
dogeza
. This is an exceedingly respectful bow that requires someone to be almost prostrate. It is the kind of bow, a translator later tells me, “that a peasant would do to a passing samurai if he wanted the samurai not to kill him.” She says it is an extremely shocking thing to do in the context of toilets. Yet it worked. Three hundred colleagues are persuaded to sit on a toilet—in private—and to mark the position of their anus by fixing a small piece of paper to a wire strung across the seat. The average is calculated (for males, it comes to between 27 and 28 centimeters—about 10½ inches—from the front of the toilet seat), but that’s only the first hurdle. Mr. Kawakami is now tasked with improving the Washlet’s ability to wash “the female place.” He needs to know how many centimeters separate a female’s two places, and is initially at a loss. Obviously the best place to research female places is in a place with females, preferably naked ones. That’s where the strip club comes in, though most strip club clientele are unlikely to react as Mr. Kawakami does, shouting, “Three centimeters!”
    I had fun having the comic strip translated out loud in a quiet restaurant in England one lunchtime when ears wagged and heads tried not to turn. But the strip club and the wire only go so far in explaining TOTO’s extraordinary success. I wanted a second opinion.
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    Inax is TOTO’s archrival. The two companies sell similar products, and in fact Inax launched a Washlet-type toilet before TOTO. But they currently have only 30 percent of the market. The Inax factory is near Nagoya, home of Toyota. I had been given instructions by email to take a slow train from Nagoya to Enokido, where I would be met. The train gets emptier and emptier, and the views more rural and less concrete—pretty