Free The Big Necessity by Rose George Page B

curved roofs, barns, gardens—until finally I’m the only person left in the carriage. We have arrived at Enokido, which is deserted. I don’t have directions from the station to the headquarters, so I don’tknow what to do, until I turn around and see that the station is in Inax’s car park. Of course it is. I bet Toyota doesn’t have a station in its car park, or its name spelled out in 109 tiny toilets (I counted) on the factory lawn.
    I wanted to come to Inax because I’d read about their Shower Toilet. Even in the realm of wonders that is Japanese toilet technology, a toilet in a shower sounded intriguing. A young PR man named Tomohiko Satou has persuaded four senior staff to meet me, and when I tell them this, they laugh. “Oh, we have that problem,” Tomohiko tells me. “The Shower Toilet is called that because it uses a shower—meaning spray—to clean. In the United States, we had to call it Advanced Toilet.”
    The Shower Toilet is the Inax Washlet, but with a difference. Twenty-seven degrees of difference. Inax has spent a lot of money deciding that a nozzle aimed at a 70-degree angle has greater firing power and accuracy. They think it cleans better. “TOTO doesn’t want backwash,” says Mr. Tanaka, the senior toilet engineer. “That is why they have 43 degrees. We don’t worry about that because the nozzle is cleaned after every use.” The 1967 version of the Shower Toilet is displayed in the factory showroom. It has a red pedal which had to be pumped to bring up hot water and a blue pedal for cold water. It didn’t sell because it cost the price of a new car and with all that water, things got rusty. It was hard to manufacture, with a 30 to 50 percent ceramic defect rate. Today the defect rate is 5 percent.
    Mr. Tanaka invites me to lunch before a quick factory visit. The cafeteria reception features a perplexing display of a Satis—Inax’s luxury toilet and Neorest rival—encased in a Plexiglass bubble in a fishing net, surrounded by shells, sand, and blue glass and accompanied by the slogan “Our gift to the future.” Tomohiko doesn’t know what it means either.
    The factory is hot. Inax’s ceramic-firing furnace is 328 feet long and burns at 1,200 degrees Fahrenheit. The temperature must remain constant, and the factory works almost year-round, because it takes too long and costs too much to fire up the furnace again. The Inax men show me robots that glue and glide beautifully, which can be trained to do other gliding tasks in only two months—at a punishing cost that cannotbe divulged. My hosts ask if I have any questions about the production process, but I can’t think of any. I’m more interested in the means of consumption than production, and specifically, how TOTO managed to vault over Inax in sales of the high-function toilet—and to convince the Japanese to use it in the first place—when Inax’s product was earlier and by some accounts better.
    Oh, they say. That’s easy. The answer to both questions is the same. It was the gorilla and the actress.
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    TOTO won over the Japanese public in several ways. On the one hand, there was the gradual approach. Washlets were installed in hotels, department stores, anywhere the public could try them, like them, and never not want to have their bottom washed and dried again. This ensured a slow but steadily growing popularity.
    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