The Lack of High-tech Toilet Seats Outside Japan May be due to Pure Racism

One of the common refrain for first-time visitors in Japan is that the country lives in the future. An example frequently cited for futuristic modernity is the prevalence of the ubiquity of the heated, bidet-enabled, remote-controlled toilet seat in Japanese restrooms. Even in personal anecdotes, I have heard too often why the piece of technology is not found outside Japan anywhere except in high-end hotels, even though the technology behind it is by no means cutting edge and the price of the product by no means prohibitively expensive even if subjected to export tariffs.

Random corners of the internet have come up with plenty of theories as to why Japanese toilet seats have pretty much stayed exclusively Japanese even after decades of their introduction to the market. Some argue that whereas Japanese restrooms are designed with a power socket, foreign homes do not see the need to reconfigure the wiring to enable electricity use in the same way. Some explanations are more practical, ranging from how heated toilets make no sense in the perpetual warmth of the tropics to how the bidets easily get clogged with bacteria after some months of use.

Yet, none of these explanations, valid enough, have prevented their rapid uptake in the Japanese market. Surely Japanese restrooms were not originally designed with power sockets, Japanese summers are hot, and Japanese housewives are just as unenthusiastic about cleaning off bacteria on their toilet seats. If Japanese people are willing to overcome these inconveniences to embrace this technology, surely there must be some segment of the non-Japanese population out there who are equally willing to take up the technology for their own homes?

A casual explanation shows that the lack of uptake has much more to do with a lack of effort by Japanese creators of these toilet seats to sell the products abroad. While some foreign tourists are enamored enough with the technology that they are purchasing it in Japan and carrying it back to their home countries as part of their checked luggage, there are rarely any advertisements for the same by Japanese companies abroad, much less being displayed in stores alongside other staples of Japanese home appliances such as washing machines and refrigerators. 

It begs the question of why Japanese manufacturers have not enthusiastically marketed the item even as they become more and more dependent upon sales outside the country to offset shrinking domestic revenues. Without too much evidence, I would venture to say that a misplaced belief that Japan has a culturally specific toilet culture impossible for foreigners to understand has at least something to do with the lack of effort. Whereas everyone needs to keep their food cold and clothes clean, perhaps not everyone has the same idea of going through an elaborate toilet ritual.

Put in a more blunt way, it might be a sense of racism that drives corporate Japan to keep this technology at home. Their unsaid belief that Japanese people are ultimately more attentive to their cleanliness on the loo than any foreigner creates an illusion of a self-fulfilling prophecy where the lack of Japanese toilet seats being marketed abroad creates the illusion that such a product would not find a ready market among those who care little about going about their business in a sanitary way. A muddled cause-and-effect relationship perpetuates a sense of cultural superiority.

Perhaps those unenthusiastic Japanese marketers can read up a little on history to realize just how wrong their assumption is. Less than a hundred years ago, the average Japanese family was still dependent on communal outhouses, with squat toilets that sent excrement for use in agricultural manure pans, hardly a sign of superior attention to cleanliness. The very idea of the bidet, so central to the high-tech Japanese toilet seat today, was not even a Japanese invention, having been invented and used centuries before in Western Europe before they were ever known by any Japanese person.

Simply said, the deliberate cultural ignorance and unsubtle racism of Japanese businessmen, when carried into the context of international marketing, would ultimately hurt Japan Inc. more than anyone else. In a world where many Japanese manufacturing champions, from cars to phones to semiconductors, have rapidly lost or are in the process of losing their global market share to more nimbly-minded foreign competitors, "saving the best for the home crowd" is not just culturally offensive, but could very much hasten the further decline of their global presence.