The Big Necessity (10 page)

After TOTO's secretiveness, I didn't expect Gauley to reveal the recipe of his
gi ji obutse
, and in fact he's contractually forbidden from doing so. When he found the right brand, he asked to buy 250 kilograms from the importer. “His eyes lit up and he said, ‘How many restaurants do you own?' I said none and that actually he'd think it was funny but I wanted to use it to test toilets. He didn't think it was funny and suddenly he didn't want to sell it to me anymore.” Gauley changed the importer's mind by promising never to reveal the name of the company. But he plans to publish the recipe online once they've analyzed it. “I'm always thinking, how can we help the marketplace? I don't want the recipe to be proprietary. I'm not trying to sell artificial poo.”

Thanks to Gauley's artificial poo, Veritec's MaP is now the best-known independent survey of American toilets available. It is fair to say he's helped make America's toilets better, though Pete DeMarco, a senior toilet man at American Standard, keeps his praise on a low heat. He calls MaP “one test among many.” In fact, DeMarco says, a strange macho one-upmanship has taken over the male arena of toilets and testing. To pass the MaP test, toilets have to flush five of the 250-gram condoms and four toilet-paper balls compiled of six sheets of toilet paper each, but some manufacturers go further, bigger, stronger. American Standard's toilets are made to flush 1,000 grams. This bigger-better mentality has reached the consumer. “People want 1,000-gram toilets,” says Gauley, wonderingly. “But even 500 grams is a waste of performance.” An interior designer friend says clients still ask her for 13-liter “traditional” toilets, not understanding that a successful flush uses the force and flow of water, not just volume.

Gauley says the marketplace has changed “incredibly” since he started playing around with soybean paste. I ask him whether the place of the toilet has changed in American culture, whether it has risen above its basic function. He says no one has ever asked him that before but now that I mention it, no. “Americans want one that works and then they want to forget about it. And that's it.”

_______

 

Ironically, the flush transformation brought about by better test media was bad for TOTO. Gauley's tests helped other manufacturers reach TOTO's flushing standards. The company had to find another way to conquer the American market. So it would go back to bottoms. In Japan, TOTO successfully sold its toilets on the concept that they could keep the consumer clean, rather than the other way around. It would do the same in America. In 2007, the expensive “Clean is Happy” campaign was introduced to the American public. There were smiley-face badges handed out on the street, viral Internet ads, and a lavish Web site featuring disturbingly cheery people telling you what Washlets could do in language Americans could understand. The deodorizer, one cheery person explained, “is kind of like the catalytic converter in your car.” The Washlet provides a “hands-free clean,” said another. It uses water, and what's so scary about that, when “we wash our faces and hair with water! Humans love water!” I was doubtful. American humans may love water, but not to clean their backsides with.

On the Web site of the American Bidet Company, company founder Arnold Cohen, who prefers to be called “Mr. Bidet,” expresses his conviction that the bidet “is the most significant innovation for personal hygiene and sanitation since the introduction of indoor plumbing.” But the bidet has known limited spread beyond its French origins, and even in France it is disappearing. Ninety percent of French homes used to have a bidet; now it's 10 percent. Yet if logic governed human cleansing habits, the bidet would be as common as the toilet. Instead, it has generally been viewed with suspicion or bewilderment. (One American schoolteacher visiting Paris in 1929 wrote in her diary, “Oh what a mistake we made about the little bathroom for the feet or whatnot.”)

As Alexander Kira writes, the bidet entails “somewhat special circumstances surrounding the cleansing of the perineal region [that are] in some instances, highly charged emotionally.” New York University sociologist Harvey Molotch, who has written about toilets as consumer items, thinks the bidet has never risen above being seen as unavoidably
French, and therefore louche. For centuries, Paris was the place to go for sex and women. Anal washing meant dirty naughtiness, something that may have inspired one American manufacturer to name its bidet model “Carmen.” The abyss between paper and water was highlighted at a 2005 art show held in New York called
Lota Stories
, in which Americans recorded their experiences of using a
lota
cup of water in their toilet habits. The results revealed years of frustration. One contributor, mindful of the frustration of trying to use water in the toilet-paper world of America, left useful advice for subterfuge. Filling a plastic cup (preferably khaki, black, or “some other nondescript color”) at the sink will draw less attention. In an apartment-sharing situation, always keep a plant in the bathroom to explain away the watering can. Above all, use discretion: “Ignore the impulse to explain what you are doing, even to friends. Unless people have been using a
lota
all their lives, the benefits completely escape them, and they will view you as a freak with a freakish bathroom custom.”

There was another problem. To sell its cleansing products, TOTO had to tell Americans they were dirty. Its first attempt didn't start well. A huge billboard ad featuring bare bottoms, supposed to hang near Times Square, had to be modified when a church in the building under the billboard successfully applied for an injunction. Bare butts, said Pastor Neil Rhodes, would impede churchgoers' concentration. “You have naked bodies before your eyes,” he told the
New York Post
. “How are you going to close your eyes and seek God?” The ad was an odd move to make in a country where conservatism can border on the puritan. Lenora Campos of TOTO is sensitive to this. “Americans do have issues around the body and bodily functions. We are very uncomfortable discussing it.” The billboard was changed because, she said, it was “off the mark. If the message is being lost and something is being generated that is unforeseen, then that message has to be changed.”

 

Delicate sensibilities have always made selling toilets and toilet products difficult. It's hard to advertise your product when social mores don't allow you to say what the product is for. Toilet paper manufacturers have responded to this in mostly uncreative ways (except
for the 1920s slogan “Ask for Hakle and then you don't have to mention toilet paper”). Since then, toilet paper advertising has been unrelentingly pastels and puppies. It's dull but it works. The global toilet paper industry is worth $15–20 billion, and according to the most recent statistics available, the average American uses 57 sheets a day.

In 2002, the toilet tissue brand Velvet departed from the norm by launching a campaign that featured “a series of lovingly photographed bare bottoms,” with the tagline “Love your bum.” It became the second most complained about ad in the UK that year (the first, an image for an antipoverty charity, featured a cockroach emerging from a baby's mouth). The world of toilet paper, said a creative director for Velvet's ad agency, “had a huge gap” compared to the creativity levels of advertisers dealing with other markets.

Toilet advertising in the United States was in equal difficulties. American Standard's Soviet-style campaign was successful because it was unusual. But most advertising still featured conservative shots of the classic American “throne” toilet, stiff in its lines and defiantly unstreamlined. At American Standard, the throne has been modernized by making it even higher, the better to take the strain off aging baby-boomers' legs. It's now an astonishing 16.5 inches from rim to floor, even more ergonomically nonsensical than usual (squatting frees up the colon and aids defecation; sitting squeezes it shut and impedes release, leading to claims that the sitting toilet has contributed to increased rates of colon cancer, hemorrhoids, and constipation). Even with all the flow dynamics and nanotechnology, the modern American toilet has actually only perfected the removal of waste from the toilet while impeding the removal of waste from the body. And the American public is happy with it.

TOTO hopes to sell its products for their health benefits. Colonic irrigation is increasingly fashionable; why not another form of healthy cleansing? But toilet paper manufacturer Kimberly-Clark also tried to appeal to health concerns when it launched Cottonelle Fresh Rollwipes, moist toilet paper on a roll. In surveys, two-thirds of Americans polled agreed that moist tissues cleaned better than dry paper. Kimberly-Clark consequently spent $100 million on the launch. Sales
of Rollwipes were dismal, and the concept disappeared from shelves. It has yet to be resurrected. Americans apparently don't want water anywhere near their perineal region, at least not yet.

Consequently, TOTO is playing the celebrity card. When Madonna visited Tokyo in 2005, for the first time in twelve years, she proclaimed publicly that she'd missed the warm toilet seat. Celebrities who have admitted to owning Neorests include Jennifer Lopez, Will Smith, and Cameron Diaz. As it did in Japan, TOTO is trying to create toilet evangelists who will do the informal marketing work. When the $1.5 billion Venetian Resort in Las Vegas was being built, TOTO products were placed in all its bathrooms, probably because its billionaire chairman Sheldon Adelson had been given Neorests to test in his home. If TOTO USA can't achieve the mass conversion it did in Japan, it will take the high road of exclusivity instead. You won't find TOTO in a Home Depot, even though that's where you'll find most toilet-buying Americans.

It took fifteen years for TOTO to be successful in Japan. That's the usual amount of time for new household products—air conditioners, washing machines—to be widely adopted. There are signs that Americans may yet succumb to the robo-toilet: in 2007, the American toilet market leader Kohler thought the market was robust enough to launch its own toilet with bidet attachment. Campos thinks the increasing visibility of the toilet in popular culture will help. She cites bathroom scenes in
Sex and the City
, in which the character of the uptight lawyer Miranda is disturbed by her boyfriend's habit of peeing with the bathroom door open, and in
Friends With Money
, Jennifer Aniston is shown cleaning a toilet (though she actually had a toilet-cleaning double). Campos says that the Neorest is starring in an upcoming film, even if its role is to perform the old foreigner-gets-wet story, which hardly seems good advertising. Celebrities such as Will Smith and Barry Sonnenfeld, director of
Men in Black
, have spoken out against the deficiencies of toilet paper. (Sonnenfeld compared using a moist wipe to “a romp through a field of daisies for your butt.”)

Perhaps the robo-toilet revolution is simply taking its time. But Tomohiko Satou of Inax is noticeably lacking in TOTO-style optimism. He has a fair sense of American views about robo-toilets, having
spent time posted in Inax's San Francisco office, where sales, he admits, were “not so much.” “Japanese people,” he tells me, “understand that our product is very sanitary and clean.” But years of trying to explain that to Americans taught him a painful truth. “Americans just don't want to use it. They're not scared. They're just not interested.”

 

 

_________________

Where would you hide? German Toilet Organization
show featuring Jack Sim (
at right
), among others

(German Toilet Organization)

 

 

“. . . AND SANITATION”

____________

 

 

From my post in the first-floor café, I have a clear view of the proceedings below. A small man with black hair is speaking with authority to a dozen or so reporters. Behind him is the usual architecture of a convention, except the booths hold toilets, a fact that doesn't stop Russian beauties in scanty clothes from draping themselves over urinals and steel sinks. Between the booths, old Russian women wander, their faces unfazed under their patterned babushkas.