One of the key takeaways from my recent Japanese trip was how even the public toilets have built-in bidets that clean your butt. I mentioned in that article that I installed one of these bad-boys in the toilet adjacent to my home office more than a year ago and as people were asking me about it, I decided to share my setup here. 🚽 Old-school toilet with a new-school built-in bidet? That’s right. My home office is on the last floor of a late-90s town house and the toilet that I have next to it has been built with 90s styling and has never been remodeled. It’s got these 90s tiles on the walls and a very typical toilet made by the Spanish company Roca. Nothing fancy, really. However, the same company also produces Japanse-style toilet covers that include a bidet so I ordered one and because it’s from the same company, it fit right in. After installation it looks like this: I know, doesn’t look impressive with the cables running so crudely, but this is a toilet basically I only use, so I…
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There were three innovations I saw in Japanese toilets the first time I visited that I hadn't seen elsewhere:
The latter was the one I was most interested in, because a lot of older houses / flats in the UK and France have tiny rooms that contain only a toilet and no space for a sink, so you have to go to a different room to wash your hands (presumably because they thought it was unhygienic to have a toilet in the room you cleaned in). This innovation made it easy to retrofit a hand-washing sink without using more space. Each flush used the water that the last person had used to wash their hands. The fanciest one of these I saw had a small heater and soap dispenser, so when you flushed the toilet the first water would be warm and soapy, then cooler water for rinsing.
Of the three, the last is the only one I haven't seen outside of Japan.