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Flush of the future | page 1, 2
I was under the impression that although women do use bidets after sex, it's mainly for freshening up their ... parts. I asked Kumi if that was what Bidet Washing was used for in Japan. She looked at Ayumi, who contemplated the translation challenge that lay ahead, and then said to me, "She probably doesn't know." Though Washlets were new to me, they have actually been on the market for 20 years, and the Toto people have no doubt grown tired of talking about them. They were eager to tell me about some of their newer inventions, such as the computerized Urinalysis Toilet and the Travel Washlet. Mr. Nakazato excused himself and came back with one of the latter. This is the Mini-Me of Washlets, a collapsible battery-powered plastic model the size of a walkie-talkie. "You fill it up with water in the toilet room, and the spraying comes out here," explained Ayumi. He pointed the device at Mr. Nakazato as though threatening to massage-wash his glasses. "When he went to Italia, he carried it." Mary Roach Mary Roach's column appears in Salon Health & Body every other Friday.
At a pause in the conversation, Mr. Nakazato slid a brochure across the table to me. It was entitled New Technology of Toto. He referred to it as "our No-Skid Technology," leading me to believe we were talking about innovations in bathtub safety. "See is believe," he pronounced solemnly and led the way, oddly, to a row of demonstration toilets. After some linguistic machinations, it became clear that he was talking about skid marks. Toto has vanquished the dreaded B.M. skid mark. We were joined by a woman in a lab coat, who stirred a beaker of brown-gray goo. Ayumi searched for words. "Mimic waste," he said finally. With a paint brush and no discernible emotion, the woman coated the toilet bowl, one side of which had been glazed with New Technology, the other with ordinary glaze. With due ceremony, the woman flushed the toilet. All four of us leaned forward over the bowl and watched as the New Technology side washed clean. After a moment of silence, Mr. Nakazato announced that you can't write on the no-skid glaze with pencil. I was unsure whether this was a flaw of the technology or an advantage, and so I merely nodded. The brochure laid out the secrets of the new glaze: nanometer-scale-smoothness and 100-percent negative ions, which repel the negative ions of the waste. This was illustrated with a four-panel cartoon featuring grimacing blobs of waste being punched away from the toilet bowl surface by a layer of fists on springs. Either that, or there is an actual Toto toilet wherein at the push of a pastel button, small fists spring up from the surface of the bowl. I will never find out, for I aim to keep my Lying-Down 3 far away from untranslated computerized toilets from here on out.
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