The Royal Flush - Japanese Toilet Technology

The 21st century doesn't look anything like I envisioned it would years ago. And when I say "I," I mean of course Hanna-Barbara, creators of The Jetsons. Where are the flying cars, the moving sidewalks, the in-home robot maids? It is precisely the lack of these 21st century comforts that makes this century suspiciously reminiscent of the 20th century, those frontier days when we were expected to walk from one part of the house to another, when we washed our own laundry and cooked our own food, a time void of futuristic technological luxuries.

It is exactly this void that Japanese toilet engineers are hard at work, trying to fill. In fact, many Japanese are currently sitting on toilets that make our white porcelain bowls look like something from the 1950's.

At this very moment, somewhere in night-shrouded Japan, a bran-fed Japanese insomniac is greeted with a glow-in-the-dark can that senses his very presence and automatically raises its lid in welcome. Furthermore, this toilet of the future offers our hypothetical somnambulant a range of highly laxative musical selections to choose from, "including chirping birds, rushing water, tinkling wind chimes, or the strumming of a traditional Japanese Harp," as an auditory aid for his after-hours transaction.

Sure, here in the West we achieve a similar effect using a night light and a portable radio. But Japanese toilet manufacturer Matsushita (literally, "under a pine tree") takes bathroom technology a step further with a bowl equipped with a variable temperature jet-spray designed to give its user a pleasurable and cleansing buttocks-wash and massage.

A pleasurable buttocks-wash and massage.