You've just demonstrated why washing toilets are superior. I cannot understand our misplaced, hollow pride in not adopting something which simply works better. I've even heard some especially crazy people try to say the japanese toilets are "perverted" - the hold tradition has on some people is just insane.

Japanese toilets are simply better. For some bizarre reason we've resisted adopting them here. It boggles the mind.

These are essentially telephone showers installed next to the toilet. You switch them on using a valve/trigger and then manually direct the fire. Simple, cheap and no fuss.

This little guy, however, turned out to be a closet fire hose. It pretty much went from 0 to 1000 gallons per sec in an instant and just wouldn't let up, the valve was stuck. The extension cord was twisting and coiling around like crazy with the released pressure, the shower head was going at full blast in my hand, initially directed at my rear, it was continuously pushing my hand away from anything that I was trying to point it to, it give me a visceral understanding of how jet engines work.

Working out a sequence of operations in my head to get out of such a situation while caught in a compromised and inflexible position, with only one hand free, was quite a challenge. I am not quite sure if I should be thankful that it wasnt autonomously powered and directed.

My first Japanese toilet experience happened @ Google (I was interning there at that time). When the water touched the derriere, it made me flinch and jump with surprise, as I wasnt quite sure what to expect, this was several years ago and Japanese toilets were still an unfamiliar opbject to me. And it really tickles the shit out of you ! (no pun intended) I guess there are ways to choose between a laminar and degrees of non laminar flow (all those controls must be for something), I would expect the former to be somewhat less flinch inducing.

I read Shogun as a kid (great book, for a little kid) and going back home to the USA and using the toilet there always reminds me of the scenes where the European sailors that shipwrecked in Japan sit around scratching their fleas and scoffing at the Japs' grotesque habit of bathing every day... gross

This was disgusting to me at first.

Echoing a few other comments, I feel like a bidet is something you have to experience yourself before you trust it. Once you do though, I think you are forever changed.

On my last trip back to the states, I remember feeling perpetually disgusted that all I had to clean myself with was paper. It's disgusting - barbaric even... you're just smearing waste all over yourself.

If you don't feel like spending the money to install a Japanese bidet, a Thai "bum gun" might be a more wallet-friendly option.

[1] - http://thatluckyboy.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/bum_gun_t...

- True that the English seat occupies less space, but its adoption has not always been based on space savings.

- True that sitting appears more gentleman like, rather than sitting half subtended in air, but hey who is watching?

- True that elderly find the english version easier to use because of the supporting nature of the seat, but its not a hard rule. A hybrid of both (Anglo-Indian) seat is more suited to them, and ailing patients.

- The Indian version is more hygienic, as no part of your body directly touches any part of the seat. Besides superior genital cleanliness over time due to wider leg positions.

- The Indian version is decisively easier to clean/maintain compared to the English version.

- Moreover the Indian version, is more suited to over-weight people than a English version.

- And relatively, due to its production in labor intensive market such as India/China, the Indian version is cost-efficient, suited for developing nations, who still have a fairly large population that needs proper sanitation structures.

http://demenglog.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/toilet-seat-...

These 'washlet' toilet seats can be retro-fitted to normal toilets. It's really easy as long as the flush-water inlet to your toilet has a standard fitting. Oh, and assuming you have a suitable power socket near the toilet. The manual recommends a GFCI (ground fault circuit interrupter) socket.

Wow! What do these do? I bent over the toilet bowl and pushed a button at random...

I don't know if this is the way the future is going to pan out - water is an increasingly scarce resource and, as it is, we waste a gallon or so of water to lift one's leavings up and over the u-bend.

Of all people Bill Gates is probably the expert on what toilets will really be like in the future, allegedly water, toilets, sanitation and health is something he is most interested in.

Personally, although I am not into 'standing desks' I am into 'standing toilets', as in the humble urinal. One's aim is easier and there is no seat to remember to put down for the next user. Less water is wasted. I would want one at home so as to avoid 'female complaints' regarding the state of things. Ideally the outflow from the adjacent sink would keep it clean so water wastage really would be minimal. It would be in a room of its own, a very small room with no need for anyone female to ever enter it.

I recently replaced an extractor fan in a bathroom. I thought that a quiet fan would be preferable and I was disappointed with the noise made. However, then I realised the real purpose of the fan, it is to make noise to disguise the sound of one leaving one's leavings. I believe that the Japanese toilets have some of this functionality too. Can anyone confirm that?

http://www.amazon.com/Lavette-Bottle-Perineal-Irrigation-DYN...

It's an even cheaper alternative to the cold water attachment, it's portable, and you can fill it with warm water.

My wife, refuses to get one, or even the fancy seat attachments because...tbh...they're freaking expensive. I can basically refit all the toilets in my house for less than the discount price for a single seat...and that's not including the cost of the electrician to put a power source near just one of my toilets.

There's also lots of research in her home country that women shouldn't use the bidets in these toilets for various reasons particular to their anatomy.

To compare, a Glacier Bay 2-piece high efficiency dual flush elongated toilet is <$100 at my local home depot.

Toto Washlet S350e seat with heated seat and warm water bidet is $1,700. I frequently see cheaper Korean versions at my local Asian Market for $800-1200. I saw one at Costco for $650 the other day.

If they want to penetrate the market, they need to drop the price significantly, corner the market, then start cranking the price up faster than inflation.

This among the many reasons why it's helpful to at least learn to read kana before visiting, as it makes a lot of things easier--there are an awful lot of English words written in kana that you can decipher (well, French in this particular case, but you get the point I hope).

Whatever else you want to say about them, they are closer to the UNIX tradition than Japanese toilets.

I had a particularly bad day at a London client onsite and out of sheer desperation Googled for travel washlet (I have one normal at home and was missing it badly), not that I had any idea how you would even construct one but lo and behold, there it is.

Washing your butt so it's clean = yeah, that's pretty cool.

Eating the right food (and being lucky to have good digestion) so that normally the paper you wipe with comes up white = priceless.

Of course you'll have to wash your hands, but still, we're not hardwired to make a mess every time we defecate. Maybe you could say that's excessive smoke indicating the engine isn't running right. Japanese toilets aren't a fix, they're a workaround.

How do you make sure that the water doesn't merely distribute your feces all over your butt?

How do women prevent that feces get sprayed onto or even into their vagina, since the water seems to be coming from the rear side of the toilet?

But it just makes sense, even in dry summer weather. Or is it blasting AC that makes shoes necessary?

Well on a ship you certainly can't wash yourself every day. And even in Europe, there was a lack of running water to wash yourself as often as you wanted. Japan has tons of rivers everywhere and is one of the richest country in terms of river water - and you can add onsen (hot springs) on top of that which provides free warm water to those living nearby. It's easy to criticize people of old, but they lived in very different conditions than we do, and Japanese had as much water as they wanted hence they developed that everyday washing culture.

Yet, Japan is actually importing water from other countries because they can't even meet their needs anymore in water supply - so the Japan model is not sustainable if you think about it this way. The consumption of water is among the highest worldwide (not just for bathing, but also washing clothes etc...) so it you applied the same model everywhere else you'd run out of water very fast in most countries.

Only winters, is the in-house rubber slippers (not the washroom ones) are changed with warm slippers.

Slip-on shoes are basically a must-have thing in Japan.

I don't really get these water shortage scares people talk about. I can see how it is an issue in remote/poor areas around the world, but a country like the US has nothing to worry about. If fresh water reserves get low we can always desalinate seawater. There are engineering challenges and energy costs to do that, but both are solvable issues. No one is going to die from thirst.

I agree that there are more ways that we should be conserving water, and we are beginning to see more toilets with a small or large flush function (which almost all Japanese toilets have as well).

As for your question about the noise function in Japanese toilets, fancy bathrooms sometimes have a noise function to cover up the noise of using the bathroom. Most normally it is a recording of a toilet flushing, but some other more "luxurious" ones have little jingles that play when you hit a button.