Quirky Japan Chronicles – Episode 20: Japan’s Toilets Are a Different Planet — and You Need a Guide
By Yoshi | Japan Unveiled
There is a specific moment that happens to almost every foreign visitor to Japan, and it happens in a bathroom.
They have arrived, they have found their hotel or their ryokan, they have managed the check-in, they have perhaps taken a short walk through the neighbourhood and confirmed that Japan is indeed as visually extraordinary as they had hoped. Then they need to use the toilet.
They enter the bathroom and encounter the toilet.
The toilet is, by any standard they bring to it, completely unreasonable.
It has a heated seat. This they manage — the warmth is immediately pleasant and immediately obvious. It has a control panel on the side, or on the wall beside it, with buttons labelled in Japanese and sometimes in English, with pictograms that partially explain the button functions and partially add to the confusion. There are multiple water spray options. There is a dryer function. There is a deodoriser button. There is something called “powerful deodoriser.” There is, on some models, a button that produces ambient music or a flushing sound — not to flush the toilet but to mask the sounds of using it.
The visitor stares at the panel. The panel stares back.
This is the Japanese toilet — the washlet (ウォシュレット, the brand name that has become generic for the entire category, like Kleenex) — and it is, depending on your perspective, either the greatest domestic engineering achievement of the twentieth century or an elaborate machine solving a problem that did not previously require this much machinery.
I want to tell you everything about it.
What the Japanese Toilet Actually Does
The modern Japanese washlet toilet provides the following functions, depending on the specific model and its features:
The heated seat. The seat is heated to a preset temperature — typically adjustable between approximately 30 and 40 degrees Celsius — and is warm when you sit down. The specific comfort this provides in the cold months of the Japanese winter — when an unheated toilet seat in an unheated bathroom delivers an immediate physical shock — is significant. The heated seat is, among all the toilet’s various functions, the one that converts the most sceptics.
The bidet function (oshiri wash). A retractable nozzle emerges from beneath the rear of the toilet seat and delivers a targeted stream of warm water. The temperature and pressure of the water are adjustable. The position of the nozzle can sometimes be adjusted. The function exists because warm water is, in fact, more hygienic than dry toilet paper, and because the Japanese engineering culture, once committed to solving a problem, tends toward thoroughness.
The front bidet (bidet or feminine wash). A separate nozzle function, with a different water stream direction, for the specific use of female users.
The drying function. After the water spray, a warm air dryer function can be activated. It is somewhat slow — a full dry requires several minutes — but it exists and is used.
The deodoriser. An air filtration and deodorisation system, typically activated automatically when the seat is occupied and continuing for a period after the seat is vacated.
The sound function (otohime or “sound princess”). A button that produces a continuous flushing sound — or, on some models, a music or water sound option — without activating the actual flush. This function exists specifically to address a specific Japanese bathroom anxiety: the social discomfort of being heard using the toilet in public restrooms, where the acoustic privacy of the stall is understood as insufficient protection against the social awkwardness of audible bathroom use.
The otohime function is named after the mythological sea princess, and it was originally a separate electronic device attached to the toilet. It was created in response to surveys that found a significant proportion of Japanese women — particularly in public restrooms — were flushing the toilet continuously while using it, in order to mask sounds with the noise of water, wasting significant water in the process. The otohime solved this: one button activates a pre-recorded sound that provides the acoustic cover without the water waste.
The automatic flush. Most public washlet toilets flush automatically when the user rises from the seat, using a motion sensor. This eliminates the need to locate and operate the flush mechanism, which is itself sometimes confusing on Japanese toilets where the flush may be a button rather than a handle, and may be located on the wall rather than on the tank.
The lid that opens automatically. Many higher-end washlet toilets have a lid that opens automatically as the user approaches, using a motion sensor. This is not strictly necessary, but it is a very nice thing.
The History: How Japan Got This Toilet
The washlet is not an ancient Japanese invention. It arrived in Japan in the early 1960s from the United States — the first bidet-style toilet seat was developed by an American engineer for medical use, and the Japanese company TOTO imported and adapted the technology.
TOTO — the acronym stands for Toyo Toki (Oriental Ceramics) — is the dominant manufacturer of Japanese washlet toilets and one of the most significant bathroom fixture manufacturers in the world. TOTO released the first Japanese washlet in 1980, and its development of the product since then — the successive addition of features, the engineering refinement of the water delivery system, the development of the self-cleaning nozzle, the integration of deodorisation and heating and drying and the otohime function — is one of the most sustained and thorough product development stories in Japanese manufacturing history.
The rate of washlet adoption in Japan is extraordinary: currently approximately 80% of Japanese households have a washlet toilet. In some urban areas and in the higher-income demographic, the proportion approaches 100%. The standard Japanese expectation is that a toilet will be a washlet, and a toilet that is not a washlet is notable as an absence.
The Public Toilet: Japan’s Other Achievement
The washlet in private homes and hotels is remarkable. The Japanese public toilet system — the network of public restrooms available in train stations, parks, shopping streets, temples, and tourist destinations — is a separate and equally remarkable achievement.
Japan’s public toilets are, by international standards, extraordinarily clean. The cleaning frequency, the maintenance quality, and the physical design of public toilet facilities in Japan consistently exceed the standards of most other countries’ equivalent facilities. This is not an accident of national character — it is the result of deliberate infrastructure investment and management, of the specific social contract that Japan maintains around public cleanliness, and of the genuinely ingenious design thinking that has been applied to public toilet architecture.
The Tokyo Toilet Project — a public initiative in which major architects were commissioned to design public toilet facilities for specific locations in Shibuya Ward — produced a series of architectural works that have attracted international attention and a documentary film. The project’s design brief: public toilets that are clean, bright, welcoming, and aesthetically excellent. The results — including a toilet pavilion by Kengo Kuma, a bathroom by Tadao Ando, and the famous transparent privacy glass toilet by Shigeru Ban (the glass is transparent when no one is inside and immediately frosted when the lock is engaged) — demonstrated that public toilet design can be taken seriously as architectural work.
This is very Japan: the thing that other cultures treat as purely functional infrastructure is in Japan treated as an opportunity for genuine design attention and genuine quality.
The Hierarchy of Confusion: Reading the Control Panel
For the first-time visitor attempting to use a Japanese washlet, the control panel is the primary obstacle. I want to provide a practical guide.
The control panel typically uses a combination of Japanese text, English text, and pictograms. The pictograms are generally intuitive once you know what you are looking for:
A figure with water lines pointing upward toward the buttocks: the oshiri (rear bidet) function.
A figure with water lines pointing forward and upward: the front bidet function.
A symbol suggesting air movement: the drying function.
A music note or water drop symbol: the sound function.
A wave or stop symbol: stop the current function.
The stop button is the most important button to locate first. If you accidentally activate a function you did not intend, the stop button terminates it. Locate the stop button before pressing anything else.
The flush — if not automatic — is typically either a large button on the panel, a lever on the side of the toilet, or a button on the wall. In some older facilities, the flush is a metal lever that must be pushed down; in many newer facilities, it is a sensor that responds to a hand wave.
The most common mistake: pressing the oshiri wash button when you intended the flush. This is extremely startling if unexpected. The water is warm, which does not make it less startling.
What Japanese People Actually Think About This
I want to address a specific question that foreign visitors sometimes ask: do Japanese people realise how unusual this is?
The short answer: mostly not, in the same way that anyone does not realise that their own culture’s normal is someone else’s unusual. The washlet is simply what a toilet is. The heated seat is simply how a toilet seat feels. The existence of a control panel is simply something a toilet has.
The moment of realisation typically occurs when a Japanese person travels abroad and uses a toilet that does not have these features. The cold unheated seat in winter. The absence of the bidet function and the resulting sense that something essential has been omitted. The unfamiliar location of the flush. These are the moments when Japanese travellers understand, from experience, that the toilet they have taken for granted is not the toilet the rest of the world has.
The reaction is reliably the same: mild horror at the cold seat, genuine sense of deprivation at the absence of the bidet function, and — upon returning to Japan — the specific comfort of returning to a home toilet that is, in every relevant sense, on one’s side.
The Toilet Museum
Japan has a museum dedicated to toilets.
The TOTO Museum in Kitakyushu City — at the headquarters of the toilet manufacturer — documents the history of plumbing, sanitation, and toilet technology from ancient times to the present, with particular attention to TOTO’s own development history and the evolution of the washlet. The museum is genuine, not a PR exercise — the historical documentation of sanitation technology is substantive, and the washlet development history includes the specific engineering problems that each generation of development addressed.
This is the specifically Japanese relationship to craft and manufacturing: the company that makes the product takes the product’s history seriously enough to museum it. The toilet deserves the same institutional respect as the automobile or the electronic device. The engineering of the thing that takes care of the most intimate human necessities is worthy of documentation and celebration.
The Export: Why the World Has Been Slow to Adopt
Given the obvious appeal of the washlet — once you have used one, the argument for its superiority over the standard toilet is difficult to make against — the international spread of the technology has been surprisingly slow.
Several factors explain the lag. The infrastructure requirement: the washlet requires an electrical outlet near the toilet, which many older Western bathroom configurations do not have. The cultural unfamiliarity: the bidet concept, well-established in France and other European countries, has historically been uncommon in the English-speaking world, creating a cultural barrier to the washlet’s additional functions. The price: the full-featured washlet is significantly more expensive than a standard toilet seat.
The adoption in the United States and other English-speaking markets has been accelerating in recent years, driven partly by the experience of visitors returning from Japan and wanting to recreate the experience at home. TOTO’s international sales have grown consistently. The pandemic, with its specific focus on hygiene, produced a notable spike in interest.
The washlet’s moment in the English-speaking world has not yet fully arrived. But it is, I believe, coming.
Japan will have given the world the warmest toilet seat in history. This is a contribution to human comfort that deserves acknowledgment alongside the more glamorous exports.
— Yoshi 🚽 Central Japan, 2026
Enjoyed this? You might also like: “Why Japan Has So Many Vending Machines — and What They Sell” and “Quirky Japan Chronicles – Episode 9: Capsule Hotels and Theme Hotels” — both available on Japan Unveiled.
