Does Japan still occupy the innovation hot seat?
Last weekend, after weeks of construction work and a profound feeling of yen well spent, we finally switched on the Lixil YBC-Z30H-NC. You know. The one with the motion sensors, self-raising lid and the unbearable burden of national symbolism.
The new occupant of the smallest room in the house is magnificent: water-efficient like a kangaroo rat, reassuringly over-specced and finished in the soothing blue-grey of a second world war Italian “maiale” human torpedo. As its internal mechanisms awake, solenoid valves and electric motors perform a soft chorale of Japanese plumbing perfection.
We have spent handsomely on our masterpiece. At $950 the YBC-Z30H-NC is, in terms of price and refinement, a good $14,000 away from being the true Rolls-Royce of Japanese toilets. But it is at least the equivalent of a five-door Mazda, it is ours, and everyone knows this particular niche of consumerism is all about the flush, not the flash.
In the end, it is just a Japanese toilet. The YBC-Z30H-NC’s fundamental features (primarily the customisable heated bidet spray) no longer require much explanation. And that is rather the point. After decades of keeping Japan’s gross national weird ticking along in the eyes of the rest of the world, these devices aren’t remotely weird any more. The normalisation is so complete that investors in Japanese toilet companies are now more interested in how extensively they have branched out into non-toilet technologies.
The Japanese toilet — as an object, as a concept, as a philosophy, as an aspiration and as a punchline — has been around for the better part of half a century. We know what they do. They know what we do. They exist in a bracket with Tom Hanks, lasagne and Mario Kart as things that are just purely good for the world. Either buy one or move on.
Our toilet purchase, which took advantage of a small local government subsidy for water-saving technology, makes us normal. It puts us, in consumer terms, right in the middle of Japan’s middle class. Mechanised, heated-seat, bidet-action Japanese toilets — generally known as Washlets after the best-selling model pioneered by the Japanese company Toto — are reckoned to be present in about 80 per cent of Japanese homes: indisputably luxurious, but also utterly mundane. They are also in schools, offices, government buildings, shopping malls, public transport hubs and a wide array of other public facilities.
Abroad, they have jumped status from curio to gold standard. Tens of millions of annual visitors to Japan experience the comfort and features of a Japanese toilet and, in most cases, an appreciation of their superiority; the principal manufacturers have built out a network of showrooms around the world. The brilliant Season 26 Episode 3 of South Park, where the owner of a Japanese toilet is threatened first by a proctologist then by the toilet paper industry, was not so much a send-up of those weird Japanese toilets, as a full-throated welcome to the mainstream.
But there is a certain risk in all this. These are tough times, and Japan could probably do with being a little bit weirder for a little bit longer.
The problem, which Japanese toilets have always neatly illustrated, is one of perception. Japan only appears eccentric if the notional centre is placed somewhere other than Japan, and it too often has been. The country, meanwhile, has been historically blessed not only with a prodigious skill in manufacture and a deep pool of people able to wield it, but with an experimental consumer population eager to give new stuff a go.
The Japanese consumer-facing business model was a chaotic laboratory: make whatever you can imagine and see if people want it. The scale, variety and speed at which that model was set in operation in the postwar period meant that Japan often managed to surprise itself with what flew with customers. The same model also provided a vitally important, rolling lesson in what didn’t work — particularly when it came to selling consumer electronics and other goods to the outside world.
The temptation has always been to apply a good deal more sociological and anthropological interpretation to this process and its outcomes than either really deserved. Japanese bottom-washing toilets, in this context, are often treated as outlandish avatars of a mysterious industrial brain; the reality is that they are just a great, well-executed idea that was widely accepted as such at a scale that made the economics work. The wider they now spread in global markets, the less weird both they and their creators seem.
Which is good, isn’t it? The catch, though, is that however loudly Japan and its defenders rail against the “weird Japan” perceptions, it has always had its uses. The collective laboratory spewing out stuff for consumers was a very effective national showcase of the innovation and technological advance Japan was achieving at the much broader, deeper industrial level. Come for the freakiness, stay for the factory automation.
Over time, the contents of Japan’s showcase have become less eye-catching, less devil-may-care, less alluringly unhinged (although the hinges are always beautifully engineered). Japan’s population is shrinking and ageing, and the economic incentives have shifted. The costs of experimentation — win or lose — are much higher in a contracting market, China and South Korea are more formidable competitors than in the past and hardware is a less critical consumer battlefront than it used to be. Japan — and toilets make a prime example here — is rightly perceived as a manufacturer of extremely high quality. It is losing, via the steady decline in gross national weird, its reputation as the innovator to watch.
That is unfortunate, because, even without the showcase, Japan remains an exceptionally powerful innovative force in the world. There is an increasingly compelling argument that, if America is serious about reindustrialising, its best hope of doing that is in deep cahoots with Japan: the close ally who has quietly been leading innovation across a rich variety of non-software fields, even as many of those have fallen off many investors’ radars.
One of Japan’s biggest risks is that it has turned a dangerous corner into moderation and that the world stops thinking of it as the world’s pre-eminent driver of novelty. The toilets have done noble work over decades, but they are now far too ordinary. Japan needs something weird.
Leo Lewis is the FT’s Tokyo bureau chief
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