japanese toilet seats launched.

Article below is about seats being launched in UK, but was at the Sydney home show the other week and a company is selling them here.

They are all over the place in Japan and really weird. After you have, ahem, finished, you push a button and a metal pipe comes out from the seat and then aims a jet of warm water at exactly the right spot. The seats are also warmed, which is great in winter but bad for global warming.

Story follows

A quiet and achingly stylish hygiene revolution kicked off in the bowels of a shop in east London today, where rows of futuristic white pods crouched patiently, hoping to attract the attention of passing buttocks.

The pods some functionally square, others gently contoured like the bills of tubby ducks are among the most luxurious, modern and expensive toilet units in the world. Beneath their seamless exteriors, the machines conceal an arsenal of intimate hoses, sudden dryers and invisible deodorisers that make most loos seem like medieval long-drops. Together with elegantly minimalist basins and baths big enough to launch fighter jets off, they make up some of the stock of the new Toto store in Clerkenwell, central London.

Although the Japanese sanitary ware company is big at home, and in Asia and the US, it is almost unknown in the UK, where many harbour ancient suspicions about highly automated toilets.

But Toto believes all that will change with the establishment of its first British outpost. "People tend to think Britons don't want to experiment, but they do," said the firm's UK general manager, Jill Player-Bishop, sweeping her hand towards the pristine bowl of an all singing, all dancing Italian-designed loo competitively priced at 2,500. Britons are "a very experimental race", added Player-Bishop, especially those who had undergone toilet epiphanies in Tokyo. "Once people have tried them," she said, the gleam of the evangelist in her eye, "they'll wonder why they never tried them before."

For the uninitiated, trying one of Toto's hi-tech Washlet loos can be an experience as odd as straddling a car wash and as nerve-racking as attempting to befoul a tame Dalek. But once you get past the scary control panel "rear cleanse/front cleanse/wand cleansing (not what you think)/seat temperature" it is undeniably refreshing. The only drawback is the price: a top-of-the-range Washlet will set you back 8,000. Little wonder, then, that Koji Nakano, president of Toto Europe, said the company was positioning itself to be "the first choice of the professional person in the UK".

In Japan, where Toto controls 60-70% of the market, society is apparently subject to a kind of lavatorial apartheid. The journalist and publisher Tyler Brl, who hosted a symposium on clean technology as part of today's launch, explained there were two kinds of people in Japan: the Washlet haves and the Washlet have nots. "It's at the point where if you know someone who doesn't have a Washlet, or you go to a restaurant that doesn't have one, it seems odd," he said. "[It's] like the rest of the world is unwashed."


http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/may/25/toto-toilets-launch