The first time I went to Japan, I was blessed with having a Japanese friend as a guide. As a result, I was taken to a variety of very normal tourist attractions.

Among them was a toilet museum. That is a museum about toilets, in case there’s any confusion.

A variety of exhibitions were on display there, including what appeared to be an entire history of human defecation—from a bygone era when Homo sapiens shat into a hole on the floor to more modern contraptions powered by artificial intelligence.

My favorite exhibition was this motorcycle, which was literally powered by human waste, and gave the term “clean energy” a whole new layer of meaning.

It dawned on me then that Japan was years—if not decades—ahead in toilet technology. And as a culture, Japan might have thoroughly perfected its culinary experience—from the beginning all the way to the end.

The mass adoption of the modern flush toilet was an underrated medical advancement.

Together with sewers and clean water, it probably added about half a decade to the human lifespan.

Yet, in most parts of the developed world, our toilets have not changed much over the last 200 years.

That is not the case in Japan, however.

As Rose George pointed out in The Telegraph, depending on the model, your Japanese toilet will measure your blood pressure, play music, clean your anus, filter your air, analyze your stool, and even save your marriage (by putting the toilet seat down).

How have Japan’s toilets advanced so much while those of the rest of the world have stagnated?

The answer lies in Japan’s biggest and oldest toilet maker: TOTO Ltd.

I later learned that TOTO holds about 60% of Japan’s sanitaryware market and leads global smart‑toilet sales. It also happens to own and operate that toilet museum I visited.

How much cultural impact can one toilet company have? You might be surprised.

In today’s video: the tumultuous rise of TOTO Ltd., and its lasting legacy on Japan’s unique toilet culture.

We can trace TOTO’s beginning all the way back to Japan’s Meiji era, more than a hundred years ago. Its founder was a handsome fella named Kazuchika Okura, born in 1875 to a household of entrepreneurs.

His father, Magobei, came from a family of publishers who operated bookstores and publishing houses.

In 1865, Magobei married his first wife, Fuji Morimura, not out of romance with her, but out of bromance with her brother, Ichizaemon Morimura.

You see, those two were best friends, and through this marriage, Magobei officially joined the Morimura family as an in‑law.

The Morimuras were a family of merchant‑traders. At the time, they were importing Western goods into Japan.

Having joined the Morimura family, Magobei left his publishing business in 1876 to help his brother‑in‑law with their trading endeavor at their company, Morimura‑gumi.

So Morimura‑gumi was basically the family business. And when Magobei had his son Kazuchika, most people expected Kazuchika to work there too.

No one really expected that he would go on to transform the toilet culture of an entire nation. Because that is just so random—where would that have even come from?

Well, Kazuchika’s interest in toilets came from his experiences abroad.

He spent eight years in the United States, first studying, then working at Morimura‑gumi’s New York office.

It was during that time that Kazuchika first experienced what it was like to live with indoor bathrooms, seated ceramic toilets, and functioning sewage systems.

Japan’s sanitary environment

To compare, sewer infrastructure was virtually nonexistent in Japan at the time.

Most Japanese households’ sanitary solution consisted of a hut, often detached from the main house.

Inside that hut was a hole in the floor where people would squat to perform fecal delivery. (fecal delivery means shitting, I think. I’ll use those terms interchangeably in this video.)

Anyway, people shat into that hole in the floor.

And at night a collection crew would come to each household to pick up their shit. These collections would then be turned into fertilizer for farming.

This is called the “night soil” system. It was actually a surprisingly well‑organized part of the Japanese agricultural supply chain. It was just not very pleasant or comfortable to use compared to flush toilets.

So Kazuchika enjoyed the American toilets while he was in New York. But the idea to actually make toilets came to him during a European trip with his dad in 1903.

At the time, Morimura‑gumi wanted to start manufacturing tableware ceramics—like cups, bowls, and plates.

So they sent Kazuchika and his father, Magobei, to Europe to inspect tableware ceramic manufacturing and learn how to do it.

But while they were there, Kazuchika became fascinated by sanitaryware ceramics instead—things like ceramic toilets, bathtubs, and sinks. He was especially amazed by how clean they looked and how resistant they were to stains.

It was unclear to me how Kazuchika came to be so fascinated by toilets of all things. But then I just spent a whole month making a video about Japanese toilet culture, so I am not one to judge.

In any case, Kazuchika saw ceramic toilets as an important part of sanitary living and wanted to bring them to Japan.

He was so enthusiastic about toilets that he wanted to start making them right away.

So upon his return to Japan, he brought the idea before Morimura‑gumi’s board of directors. However, the idea was quickly shut down.

The board’s main objection was that Japan had little sewer infrastructure. It was therefore rather pointless to produce flush toilets when there was no sewer for the toilets to flush into.

A pretty reasonable objection, I think—one that almost made Kazuchika’s idea sound stupid.

Still, Kazuchika’s desire to make toilets remained unwavering. So in 1912, he put up his own money, along with some funds from his dad, and started an R&D lab in the city of Nagoya.

Its goal was to experiment with sanitaryware production and attempt to create a flush toilet. This lab would later become TOTO Ltd. (founded as Toyō Tōki Co., Ltd. in 1917; renamed TOTO in 2007). For simplicity, I’ll refer to it as TOTO throughout the rest of the video.

Before we move on, I want to acknowledge Magobei as the father of the year. As an Asian dad, not only did he not kill his child’s dream—he financially supported it instead, even though that dream consisted of making flush toilets in a country with no sewage systems.

But even with daddy’s money, making a flush toilet was not easy.

We probably don’t think of toilets as difficult to make today, but at that time, not a single person had successfully created a flush toilet in Japan.

It would take TOTO two years and more than 17,000 iterations before they created their first functioning flush toilet in 1914.

It looked like this.

The test sale

But TOTO worked quickly. By August of that year, TOTO had produced enough prototypes that they were ready for a test sale.

They picked the best of what they made and sent them to stores to be sold alongside imported toilets.

And the results were positive. TOTO’s prototypes were shown to be just as competitive as their imported counterparts.

This made Kazuchika happy.

He wanted to move forward with mass manufacturing right away, but there was one problem.

Manufacturing ceramic toilets turned out to be very difficult.

The most challenging part was the final firing process. This is where toilet‑shaped clay gets heated at high temperatures to be hardened into smooth and solid ceramics.

This process occurs in a device called a kiln, which is basically a big oven that can sustain industrial‑level temperatures.

The conventional kiln then standard in Japan was powered by coal, which heated the air inside the kiln from the bottom through conduction.

Forgive my crude attempt at thermodynamics here, but hot air is lighter than cold air. When the air at the bottom of the kiln got heated, it became lighter and floated upward, while the colder air at the top was heavier and sank down. As the air circulated in this way, the top portion of the kiln was usually hotter than the bottom on average.

This uneven heat distribution was less of a problem for producing small tableware ceramics like plates and cups.

But toilet bowls were much larger and more complex in shape.

As toilet‑shaped clay pieces heated up and dried, they also shrank—sometimes by as much as 12%.

As a result, the uneven heat distribution caused different parts of the toilet to shrink at different rates, resulting in cracks, distortions, and, in general, a high rate of defects.

Fortunately for Kazuchika, anyone who attempted to make ceramic toilets at the time would have run into this exact same problem. As such, various solutions had already been tried.

The best solution at that time was in Europe, where a British engineer named Conrad Dressler created a tunnel‑shaped kiln.

This fancy kiln had special air channels in the wall that directed airflow in such a way as to achieve uniform heat distribution. The tunnel shape also allowed products to be moved through the kiln continuously, resulting in much higher throughput.

This was exactly what Kazuchika needed for mass manufacturing.

All that was left to do then was for Kazuchika to go to Europe and get himself one of these Dressler tunnel kilns.

There was one problem, though. Europe was not the best place to be at that time. Because, well, World War I.

That didn’t stop Kazuchika, however—although I’m not sure why it didn’t stop him. It should have stopped him. Like, how about not going to Europe in the middle of World War I.

But I guess not. A mere world war was apparently not enough to get between Kazuchika and his toilets.

So in 1915, Kazuchika left Japan, accompanied by two colleagues. They first arrived in the U.S., then France and Britain.

The U.S. part of the trip was okay, but the European part was less satisfying due to wartime restrictions.

While Kazuchika stayed in London, the air‑raid searchlights were up every night. But fortunately, Kazuchika did not appear to have personally run into any direct conflict.

He was able to inspect some facilities in Britain and France and placed orders for equipment. In that same year, TOTO also started negotiations to acquire a Dressler tunnel kiln, although the war significantly delayed it.

It was not until 1918 that the negotiations were finalized.

The construction of the Dressler tunnel kiln factory began swiftly, just two months after the end of WWI, and was completed in the following year.

So now that TOTO had the Dressler tunnel kiln, all that was left to do was to fire up that bad boy and start pumping out lots and lots of toilets, right?

Not quite.

Japan still did not have much sewer infrastructure, so the demand for flush toilets remained low.

In fact, the Dressler tunnel kiln was shut down in the same year it was built because there weren’t enough people buying flush toilets.

I suppose even the best entrepreneurs with the most powerful reality‑distortion field cannot conjure up an entire sewerage infrastructure out of nothing.

Things changed, however, on September 1, 1923. Or rather, lots of things changed all at once, in the form of one of the most destructive earthquakes in Japanese history.

It’s called the Great Kanto Earthquake, as it devastated Japan’s Kanto region. Kanto was Japan’s political and economic centre, which included Tokyo, Yokohama, and the surrounding prefectures.

The shaking began at 11:58 a.m.—just before lunchtime—when many households and restaurants were cooking lunch over charcoal or gas stoves. As a result, thousands of small fires broke out almost instantly.

To make matters worse, a powerful typhoon just offshore brought strong winds, turning these small fires into massive firestorms.

This was on top of the tsunamis and landslides that followed along coastlines and in mountainous zones.

When the dust settled, the death toll climbed to over a hundred thousand people. More than 500,000 homes were destroyed, turning more than a million people effectively homeless.

About half of Tokyo and Yokohama burned down, including TOTO’s Tokyo office, but TOTO soon resumed operations.

As it turned out, the post‑disaster reconstruction efforts built a lot of modern infrastructure into the ruins the earthquake left behind. This included modern sewer systems.

In addition, to replace the damaged buildings, new buildings rose across the cities. These buildings needed bathrooms, and those bathrooms needed toilets.

All of this led to a massive surge in demand. And for a while, TOTO received more orders than they could fulfill.

The rebuilding effort also sparked a sustained wave of sewer expansion and urban growth, resulting in a sustained increase in demand lasting long after the rebuilding effort’s completion.

In fact, demand was strong enough that TOTO built another plant in Chigasaki, specifically to serve Tokyo’s booming market.

By 1937, TOTO was running at full tilt, with six months’ worth of backlogged orders.

So things were going well.

TOTO was making great products. People were loving them.

Until WWII came along and shut down that party.

During WWII, Japan transitioned its domestic industries into what’s called a “war economy.”

During this time, private citizens still owned their businesses on paper, but the government took control of what they could make, how much they could make, and who got the output.

This allowed the Japanese government to direct industrial output toward the war effort.

For instance, Toshiba made military electronics, and Toyota produced trucks for the army.

The transition to a war economy happened gradually in Japan. So at first, TOTO could still make sanitaryware to some degree, although fuels like coal were rationed.

TOTO did their best to find substitute fuels. But by 1944, TOTO had to stop producing civilian sanitaryware pretty much entirely.

Instead, they were ordered to produce things like heat‑resistant ceramic insulators used in aircraft ignition systems.

TOTO was also hit by the destruction of war—like their Tokyo branch, which was completely destroyed by fire during the air raids in 1945.

Most notably, on August 6, 1945, the first atomic bomb landed in Hiroshima. Just three days later, the aircraft Bockscar took off, carrying the second atomic bomb to be dropped in Japan.

Bockscar’s primary target was Kokura, which was a major military and industrial hub in Japan. It was also home to TOTO’s head office and main production complex, including that Dressler Tunnel Kiln Kazuchika obtained after WWI.

When Bockscar arrived in Kokura, the city was covered by heavy cloud cover—partly a result of weather, but also due to the smoke from the bombing of a nearby city the day before.

Bockscar opened its bomb bay and circled over Kokura three times to attempt a visual drop, but could not confirm the target.

So eventually, it diverted to its secondary target: Nagasaki.

Had the atomic bomb actually landed in Kokura, most of TOTO would have been destroyed.

This isn’t cause for celebration, however, given that the atomic bomb was eventually dropped on Nagasaki.

I thought the aftermath of these atomic weapons was one of the hardest things I’ve read. I was then reminded that this was just one of many such mass‑casualty events that occurred in WWII, which turned out to be one of the bloodiest periods in human history.

In any case, with the second atomic bomb, Japan surrendered six days later.

On September 2, 1945, Japan formally signed the Instrument of Surrender, marking the official end of WWII.

While the Allies celebrated the end of the war, to the Japanese, the future was uncertain.

It was unclear what fate had in store for a country ravaged by a war in which they were an aggressor.

Domestically, Japan was in turmoil. Among its ruined cities and collapsed industries were extreme shortages of goods, scarcity of food, and inflation.

In the case of TOTO, they lost their export market almost entirely. Domestic demand for sanitaryware was also nonexistent—and understandably so.

Frankly, getting a flush toilet was not top of mind for most Japanese people at that time.

But TOTO thought waiting was not going to bring them any answers, and decided to act instead.

They temporarily stopped making the toilets that no one wanted and began producing basic household ceramics instead—just the kind of everyday necessities people needed to get by but didn’t have in the immediate post‑war chaos.

This allowed TOTO to keep its factories going and retain its workers while waiting for demand to return.

And demand did eventually return.

From the 1950s to the early 1970s, Japan underwent a remarkable period of unbelievable economic growth at a rate averaging about 10% per year—a period that would come to be known as Japan’s post‑war economic miracle.

Like many Japanese companies at the time, TOTO rode the rising wave of economic growth; oh boy, did they ride that wave hard.

The post‑war plumbing infrastructure rollout made TOTO’s products more viable nationwide.

And the rising middle class allowed more people to afford Western‑style bathrooms at home.

So by the 1960s, having flush toilets became the norm for middle‑class households.

This was also the time when products made in Japan acquired the reputation of being high quality. TOTO took advantage of this and began exploring foreign markets.

Most notably, Japan’s rapid urbanization, along with the housing boom, meant millions of new buildings—like apartments, schools, and offices. Pretty much all of them needed toilets and sinks.

International events like the Tokyo Olympics in 1964 were the cherry on top that further accelerated the building of public infrastructure, and with that, TOTO’s sales.

As a result, TOTO’s output grew more than tenfold during this period, and its headcount went from a few thousand to over 10,000 people.

This period also saw a transformation of Japan’s toilet culture—from squatting to sitting.

Squat toilets were more common at first, because those who were used to the old night‑soil systems found squat flush toilets more familiar to use.

In fact, there were still enough squat toilets in Japan during the 1964 Tokyo Olympics that they confused the shit out of many foreign visitors (no pun intended).

Many foreigners looked at this oddly shaped hole in the floor and did not know what to do.

I found some picture tutorials that were displayed in public bathrooms to teach foreigners how to use the Japanese‑style squat toilets.

They included instructions like where to squat, which direction to face, and don’t stand up during fecal delivery.

Apparently enough people were doing that as to warrant an explicit instruction in the manual.

But just as foreigners were baffled by squat toilets, Japanese people were baffled by seated toilets.

It might be unintuitive to appreciate how big a cultural shift seated toilets were in Japan.

For context, sitting down on chairs was not really a part of traditional Japanese living.

For centuries, our Japanese friends sat on floors, ate on floor tables, and slept on floor futons. Squatting on the floor for toilets was just a natural extension of this floor‑centric living.

A culture that didn’t sit on chairs to begin with wouldn’t simply decide one day to start sitting on toilets.

Therefore, the transition from squat to seat toilets was a microcosm of a broader shift in lifestyle—from floor‑centric living to a more Westernized variant that included chairs, tables, and seated toilets.

This shift was led by the post‑war infrastructure build‑out, which created many Western‑style facilities.

For example, the public housing built then had a standardized Western layout with separate spaces for kitchen, dining, living, and sleeping. This design was intended for Western furniture like tables and chairs.

The same trend happened in offices and schools.

So as people lived, worked, and studied in these chair‑centric spaces, their habits changed over time—and along with that, their preferred method of fecal delivery.

In 1977, TOTO’s seat toilets outsold their squat toilets for the first time, and it never reversed.

Kazuchika had passed away by then. Had he been alive, I think he would be happy to see it.

Japan was now caught up to the West in terms of toilet culture. Those clean, comfortable, flush seat toilets he enjoyed during his time abroad were now widely available in Japan too.

But this is also the point in history where Western toilet culture stagnated while Japanese toilet culture continued to venture forward.

Because TOTO wasn’t going to stop here.

They wanted to continue to innovate and push boundaries, even if it made people uncomfortable.

So in 1980, TOTO made this.

What is this, you might ask?

Well, I acknowledge that it looks confusing.

Without context, I would have thought that the toilet was broken.

In fact, it looks like the exact opposite of what’s supposed to happen—like I’m supposed to do this to the toilet, not the other way around.

But no, the toilet is functioning as intended.

This product is called the Washlet—a name created by reversing the English phrase “Let’s Wash.”

To use this product, you are supposed to sit on it while water streams into your anus to wash it clean at the end of a fecal‑delivery session.

Now, at this point I had two questions:

Who the fuck came up with this idea?

And why?

Well, the original idea came from America, where the American Bidet Company created a product called Wash‑Air‑Seat.

It was an electronic bidet that could be integrated into toilets. It was aimed at helping those with limited mobility that prevented them from cleaning themselves with toilet paper after using the toilet.

The Wash‑Air‑Seat sucked, though. The operation was complicated, performance inconsistent, and it was also very expensive. So it was mainly sold to institutions like hospitals.

However, TOTO saw great potential in the product for the mass market.

I’m not sure why they thought that, but they did.

So in the mid‑1970s, TOTO began designing a product of their own.

Designing the Washlet

Now, the basic idea of this product is to have a stick—called a wand—that sticks out and shoots water into a person’s anus.

To do this, TOTO’s engineers needed to know where people’s anuses were when seated on a toilet, which was a rather specific piece of knowledge that was not readily available at the time.

Fortunately, TOTO had a lot of employees—all of whom had anuses.

So the engineers asked other employees to help, but the request was met with a lot of resistance.

With typical Japanese politeness, one employee was quoted saying, “Although we are colleagues, I do not want you to know the position of my anus.”

But the employees eventually gave in, apparently won over by the sheer passion of the engineers.

In the end, more than 300 employees took part in the design process.

Each of them sat down naked on a toilet seat in a private space. They then marked the location of their anus on a piece of paper that was hanging on a piece of rope across the toilet bowl.

With this data, the engineers determined that the angle of the wand must be kept at a precise 43 degrees, and dubbed it the golden angle. I’m not making this up.

This golden angle allows the water stream to hit the anus most accurately, while simultaneously preventing the water from splashing back onto the wand—resulting in a safe passage through the anus.

But our story isn’t over. After ascertaining the golden angle for the anus, the engineers needed to know the same for the vagina.

Because the Washlet also cleans the vagina.

To do this, the engineers needed to know where the vaginas were. The engineers didn’t know that, because they were all virgins.

I’m joking. The data they needed was something more technical about female anatomy—the average distance between the anus and the vagina.

And perhaps asking TOTO’s female employees something like that directly would be a sexual‑harassment lawsuit waiting to happen.

So legend has it that the TOTO engineers made several trips to strip clubs undercover to acquire this data.

Is the strip‑club story real?

Now, for the sake of truth and accuracy, I spent some time looking into whether this strip‑club story was real. And here’s what I found.

The strip‑club episode was first documented in 1985 as a company history in the magazine Weekly Sankei. Weekly Sankei is no longer in print, but at the time it was considered a broadly reputable mainstream magazine.

The story was then referenced a few times in Western coverage, such as a piece in Scientific American.

In 2020, the Japanese news outlet withnews very helpfully published a fact‑checking piece on this exact story, in which their reporter asked TOTO directly for comment.

TOTO’s official response was that the person in charge of product development at the time had already retired, so they couldn’t verify it.

I think that is an expected answer from a publicly listed company. I can understand why they wouldn’t want to admit on record that they sent their engineers to strip clubs on corporate expense.

But without official confirmation, it leaves the strip‑club story in the realm of legend, and I’ll leave it up to you to believe it—or not.

The marketing plan

In any case, the Washlet was eventually created, with the golden angle of 43 degrees for the anus, and 53 degrees for the vagina.

It was, for all intents and purposes, a great product.

But how on earth would TOTO convince people to use it?

When most people see a stream of water shooting out of a toilet, their instinct is probably to run away.

So how does one convince people to override that primal human instinct and move their ass toward the water stream instead?

To accomplish this, TOTO hired the famous marketer Takashi Nakahata, who created a now‑infamous TV commercial.

The commercial employed the famous Japanese singer Jun Togawa. Jun was known for her rebellious and anti‑mainstream spirit—the exact kind of energy TOTO needed for the role.

The commercial starts with Jun asking a simple question:

“When your hands get dirty, you don’t simply wipe them with paper, do you? You wash them, right?”

She illustrates this by putting blue paint on her hand, then wiping it away with toilet paper—showing that it doesn’t work—and implying that the same thing is happening to your anus.

Quite clever, I would say.

The commercial then ended with Jun turning around, lifting up her skirt, and uttering the now‑famous slogan: 「おしりだって、洗ってほしい。」(Oshiri datte, aratte hoshī.), which translates to “Even your bottom wants to be washed.” The original was catchier.

Now, in the early 1980s, talking about butts or toilets on TV was considered taboo and indecent in Japan.

So when the commercial first aired, TOTO received a lot of hate from viewers who could not believe that a toilet commercial had just aired on prime‑time TV.

But there were also those who loved it. The humour and playfulness—especially with Jun’s quirky performance—disarmed much of their discomfort.

They saw it as a sort of bold cultural statement.

But love it or hate it, you could not ignore it. The initial shock and outrage became the engine that propelled the commercial to viral status.

Eventually, pretty much anyone in Japan who was sentient in the 1980s knew about this commercial and TOTO’s quirky new toilet.

Positive feedback loop

And with that, sales began to come in.

It was slow at first, but consistent—and at one point, enough people got the Washlet at home that they began to request public washrooms to have them, too.

This started a positive feedback loop.

The more people owned the Washlet, the more people requested them in public facilities.

That gave more people opportunities to try them, which in turn boosted more sales.

Eventually, the sales volume reached escape velocity, and the Washlet blew up. I mean—in terms of sales.

TOTO would go on to sell 60 million Washlets worldwide and popularize the use of Washlet‑style bidets across Japan.

At the time of this recording, more than 80% of Japanese households own Washlet‑style bidets. In fact, there are now more Japanese households with these high‑tech toilets than there are with computers.

With the mass adoption of the Washlet, Japan’s toilet culture departed from the mainstream and embarked on the road less traveled.

What difference did that make? All of it.

TOTO itself continued to innovate, of course. Their latest toilet can now analyze your stool to provide data about your health.

But the movement is bigger than one company.

What TOTO has shown with the success of the Washlet and other products is that the sanitaryware industry is attractive and profitable—causing many firms to enter the competition.

This competition not only produced innovative products, but also advanced Japan’s toilet culture as a whole.

In most parts of the developed world, we look down on the humble toilet and consider it an afterthought. That was once the case in Japan, too, where toilets were considered too taboo to even show in TV commercials.

But today, toilets are an important part of life in Japan and deserve as much attention and respect as anything else.

Japan now has an unofficial toilet day (November 10th, because the date can be read in a way that sounds like “good toilet” in Japanese), a “Toilet Association” dedicated to Japanese toilet culture, and they host a competition every year for the best public toilets—which has resulted in some gorgeous facilities that are as much logistics as art.

Toilets are seen almost as a cultural gesture of sorts.

They’re associated with ideas like omotenashi, which is a kind of Japanese‑style hospitality characterized by attention to the smallest details and the mindful elevation of parts of life often overlooked.

Japan’s toilet culture is starting to seep into the rest of the world, too.

Integrated electric bidets are becoming more common in the West. I saw one featured on Linus Tech Tips, and on Ali Wong’s Netflix special. I even found a TOTO toilet in my friend’s house all the way in Canada.

When my friend asked me why I was taking a picture of her toilet, I explained that it put me in a pensive mood.

It struck me that about a hundred years ago, Japan struggled to make a single solitary toilet. Today, their sanitaryware industry leads and shapes the toilet culture of the world.

And it all happened because one stubborn kid wanted to make toilets before there were sewers—and his chill Asian dad, who didn’t stop him.