Genius! Part II – RoboLoo

What does Japan mean to you? Is it Hello Kitty and Pokémon? Sumo and Samurai? Bowing and disemboweling? Maybe you think of the glorious and often frightening variety of products available for sale through vending machine? Or perhaps it’s pint-sized businessmen rocking the paint off the walls with ten-beer karaoke? Whatever your impression may be, I believe one Japanese innovation stands above all others in the minds of in-the-know westerners, and that would be the space-age toilets that so efficiently deal with your waste.

For reasons I don’t even want to begin to consider, we have never really adopted this absolutely wonderful innovation in crap-nology. Why, pray tell, do we take every poorly conceived piece of manga and anime and run it ad nauseam on Adult Swim and sell it en masse at Comicon conventions? Did the overweight 40 year-old virgins with nacho-stained Yoda t-shirts do us some great favor in the past that allows them to dictate our cultural imports from the East? Was there some trade summit presided over by a guy who still lives in his parents’ basement hammering out Xena fan fiction that decreed all trade with Japan (not related to cars and TVs) would be focused around trading card games and characters with platter-sized eyes and skirts shorter than my attention span when watching a romantic comedy?

Why have we not yet adopted the wonderful toilet technology of Japan? Why?!

Imagine a toilet that kept its seat warm for you on cold winter nights. Imagine a toilet that automatically raised its lid in honor of your arrival. Imagine a toilet with a built in ass-sprayer where you could set water temperature, pressure, angle, and even select from a number of rhythmic pulsing options. Imagine a toilet that would blow warm air on your posterior after the aforementioned spraying. Imagine a toilet that (for the ladies) could produce elegant sounds so no one would have to hear you suffering the aftereffects of a seven-layer burrito you inhaled at lunch. And imagine you could control all this by remote control.

But there is more to these porcelain princes than a borderline disturbing devotion to robotizing the restroom, there is some seriously hardcore common sense being used here too. For example, all toilets have a bi-directional flush handle – one for “big” and one for “small.” Why have we not yet adopted this? In our rush to embrace low-flow toilets, why have we insisted on a one-flush-fits-all mentality? Furthermore, when the tank is refilling, it runs the refill water through a tap on the top, which empties into the tank, so you can use that water to refill the tank and wash your hands - just such a good idea