Totally Toilet, Toto

Travellers to Japan and other points far and east may have encountered Toto toilets.  It’s not an experience you forget in a hurry.  As a spotty teenager at a grotty public school this Fogey became used to Izal crunchy toilet paper that just spread the pooh around rather than scraping it away and exterior toilet blocks with no heating, which meant bum-skin almost fused with the unforgiving Bakelite-style seats whenever the weather turned frosty.

Mrs Fogey claims to derive no intrinsic pleasure from popping out number twos but all men will quietly agree that there are few experiences in life more satisfying than a good dump – with or without a copy of The Sunday Times.  There are physiological reasons for this – the anus is home to a profusion of nerve endings that are unfeasibly sophisticated at discerning solid from both liquid and gas.  Other body parts are similarly endowed but that sphincter is in a class of its own. It’s what makes a good scratch so blissful.

So, during school time, laying a log was no fun whatsoever.  It was only later, with the advent of wooden seats and pillow soft bog roll that things began to look up.  And then Toto came into our lives.  The company was founded in Japan in 1917 and made its first Washlet toilet with a heated seat in 1980. They make standard, ceramic sanitary-ware as well but are best-known for bogs with auto bum-wash.  In the UK ‘elf and safety’ doesn’t like electricity in bathrooms which used to mitigate against Toto but since there are now so many posh bathroom fixtures – TVs, speakers, foamy jet bath thingies – that require power, you’d think that safely wiring a Toto would be no problem.  And it isn’t.  It’s our anally retentive British sensibility and the price that are problematic.

Decisions, decisions

The Fogey household’s first full-on Toto bonanza was at the Park Hyatt in Tokyo.  The room was equipped with a Washlet that had not only a heated seat but also a rinsing spray-probe for front and back bottoms and a warm air cleft dryer.  The water spray could be constant or oscillating; fierce or gentle.  The cosy warm caress of the seat was wonderful and at least one attendant Fogey spent many happy hours thus ensconced.  The undercarriage hose was another matter.

Fast forward a good few years and here we are in Thailand at a hotel with a Washlet SG TCF491A in every room.  This Fogey is at that life stage where incidental pleasures assume ever greater significance, especially if they can be enjoyed privately and often.  Which is where a Washlet comes into its own.

One can only wonder at the many happy hours researchers and product development bods at Toto HQ must have had perfecting the accuracy of their rinsing spray.  ‘Washlet spray-probe must deploy and locate claggy ring-piece with millimetre precision,’ they might have said.  And if they did, it worked, because it does.  After heaving out a hefty one, you press the ‘rear cleansing’ option and the warm-water probe scootles out from under the rear rim and, having homed in on its target, squirts water up your jacksie.  Disconcerting and a bit tickly at first (it’s more difficult to suppress girly squeals than you might imagine) one settles into the experience, taking on the air of the recently lobotomised and sinking into a baleful trance as every morsel of botty debris is rinsed away.  It’s a reverie that could go on and on and on and might need the intervention of, say, a phone call, doorbell or wifely yell to break the spell.

But does it work?  Well, sort of.  The fail-safe back-up of a paper wipe is still required.  You just wouldn’t risk the possibility that your cleft was neither totally clean nor totally dry.  I mean, imagine.  Actually, no, don’t.

We only tried the back-bottom rinse.  Mrs Fogey is the mistress of the withering stare and it was never more so than when we wondered whether the Washlet’s frontal flange jet would successfully eradicate the whiff of week-old herring.  “If more men had these toilets in their bathrooms nothing would ever get done,” she said.  “You spend half your life in there as it is.”  Extrapolating slightly we wondered whether a UN resolution could be proposed and passed whereby, at the onset of winter, Washlets were air-dropped to the Taliban in Afghanistan.  Problem solved, we thought, until we also considered the installation, water and power supply issues.  Perhaps Toto could develop a self-powered, self-contained model specifically for war-halting purposes.  Nothing else seems to be working.

Toto has its own toilet museum which has its own web page but it’s all in Japanese.  Browse their GB website and be as flushed with wonder as Toto must be with pride, (sorry, had to get that in somewhere…) but don’t try and find prices; you will fail.  Several minutes of frustrating web-browsing gleaned only that a similar model of Washlet in the US would set you back around $2,400 (£1,500), presumably without fitting, and that heated Toto seats by themselves are in the $300-$400 range.  You really would be determined to get your money’s worth at those prices.  And then there’s the ‘what does my toilet say about me?’ question.  That ‘I am more fond of luxurious defecation than you might have first imagined,’ might be the sum of it, which is information that social media would cause to do the rounds very swiftly indeed.  TF could deal with such notoriety because we would know, beyond a shadow of a doubt (among men, at least), that any snide comments were borne of pure envy.  But in all likelihood it would be the wives of Britain who would have the final say. Great British toilet habits are for public convenience, not consumption. When we head for home on Monday we shall miss our Washlet.  But at least we’ll get more done.