The Japanese Toilet, Fully Explained (Every Button)

Nearly every visitor to Japan has the same experience within the first day: they sit down on a toilet, notice a control panel bolted to the side with eight unlabelled buttons, and decide to touch nothing. This is a guide to touching the buttons.

How normal this is in Japan

The high-tech toilet is not a novelty item or a luxury hotel flourish. According to Cabinet Office consumer surveys, over 80% of Japanese households with two or more people own one, with an average of more than one unit per household. In 1992, when the statistic was first collected, the figure was 14.2%. It is one of the fastest and most complete adoptions of any household appliance in modern Japan.

TOTO launched the Washlet — now used as a generic term the way "Hoover" is in Britain — in 1980, backed by an advertising campaign so direct it became famous: "Even a bottom wants to be washed."

The buttons, in order of usefulness

A basic panel. Note that the largest, most prominent button is almost always STOP.

• 止 / STOP — Always the biggest and usually red or orange. This is the one to find first. Everything else is recoverable if you know where this is.
• おしり / SPRAY (or REAR) — The main rear wash. On most units the icon is a stylised bottom with an upward arrow.
• ビデ / BIDET (or FRONT) — Front wash, intended for women. Usually a pink or lighter-coloured button.
• 水勢 / WATER PRESSURE — A dial or +/− pair. Worth turning down before your first attempt rather than after.
• 乾燥 / DRYER — Warm air drying. Slower than you expect; most people use it as a supplement to paper rather than a replacement.
• 音姫 / SOUND (Otohime) — Plays running water to mask other sounds. Named "Sound Princess," it exists because people were flushing repeatedly to cover noise, and TOTO calculated the water this was wasting.
• 便座 / SEAT TEMPERATURE — The heated seat. In a country where homes often have no central heating, this is less of a gimmick than it sounds.

Things that will surprise you

The lid may open by itself. Many units have a motion sensor. Do not read anything into it.

The flush control is often not on the panel. Look for a separate lever, a wall panel, or a sensor pad. Two kanji matter here: 大 (dai, large flush) and 小 (shō, small flush).

Some public toilets are still squat toilets. Older stations, parks, and rural facilities may have them. You face the hooded end. Multi-stall public toilets usually have at least one Western-style stall, often marked with a sign.

Slippers. In homes, traditional inns, and some restaurants, there is a dedicated pair of toilet slippers just inside the door. You change into them, and — this is the part people get wrong — you change back out of them when you leave. Walking into a dining room in toilet slippers is a small, memorable social disaster.

Why Japan went this far

Two reasons usually get cited. The first is a long-standing cultural emphasis on bathing and cleanliness, the same impulse that produced onsen culture. The second is more prosaic: Japan modernised its plumbing late and fast, mostly in the post-war decades, so a huge number of homes were fitting new fixtures at exactly the moment the technology became affordable. There was no century of installed porcelain to argue with.

The result is a country where the public toilet in a suburban train station is frequently nicer than the one in your hotel at home. It is a genuinely strange thing to become used to, and a genuinely annoying one to leave behind.