Japanese washlet bidets gain ground in US despite tariffs, cultural gaps

Business Standard

5 days ago

Having conquered its home market, the Japanese toilet-maker Toto is selling more bidets in the United States. Toto's president says not even tariffs will halt its advance.
In 1982, a peculiar commercial aired on televisions across Japan.
An actress in a pink floral dress and an updo drops paint on her hand and futilely attempts to wipe it off with toilet paper. She looks into the camera and asks: 'Everyone, if your hands get dirty, you wash them, right?'
'It's the same for your bottom,' she continues. 'Bottoms deserve to be washed, too.'
The commercial was advertising the Washlet, a new type of toilet seat with a then-unheard-of function: a small wand that extended from the back of the rim and sprayed water up. After its release, Toto, the Washlet's maker, was deluged with calls and letters from viewers shocked by the concept. They were also angry that it was broadcast during evening prime time, when many were sitting down for dinner.
Four decades later, Japan has overwhelmingly accepted Toto's innovation. Washlet-style bidets, sold by Toto and a few smaller rivals, are a common feature in Japan's offices and public restrooms and account for more than 80 percent of all household toilets, according to government surveys.
Toto now sees a similar shift emerging in the United States.
After decades of trying to persuade leery American consumers of the merits of bidets, Toto Washlets have become something of a social phenomenon — popping up on social media tours of five-star hotels and celebrity homes. The comedian Ali Wong devoted a segment of her 2024 Netflix special to Toto's 'magical Japanese toilet.' In 2022, the rapper Drake gifted four Totos to the artist DJ Khaled.
An industry report last year showed that more than two in five renovating homeowners in the United States are choosing to install toilets with speciality features, including bidet toilet seats. Toto's profits in its Americas housing equipment business have grown more than eightfold over the past five years — and the company has its sights on expanding even more.
'I could have never imagined how popular Washlets would become overseas,' said Shinya Tamura, a former Washlet engineer who was recently appointed Toto's president. But as was the case with Washlets in Japan, 'once the fire is lit, they tend to hit a J curve,' he said.
Toto was founded in 1917 in Kitakyushu, an industrial port city at the tip of Japan's southernmost main island. Like many Japanese companies, Toto excelled at adopting and refining overseas technologies, such as Western-style seated flush toilets, for the Japanese market.
In the 1960s, Toto noticed a little-known bidet-like device being used in the medical industry in the United States. It began redeveloping the device in Japan, enlisting more than 300 employees to test and optimize aspects like the water stream's flow, angle and temperature.
The Toto Washlet first appeared in 1980. At the time, the product had three primary functions: washing, drying and a heated seat. It was expensive, costing the equivalent of about $2,000 in today's currency, and early models were known to sometimes spray inspectors in the face.
The Japanese public was slow to warm to the devices. It took Toto 18 years to sell its first 10 million Washlets. But Toto added features — deodorising in 1992 and automatic flushing and lid opening in 2003 — and sales picked up.
In current models, the water spray is kept at a precise 100.4 degrees Fahrenheit, a temperature the company describes as 'warm but not surprising.' Toto sold another 10 million Washlets between 2019 and mid-2022 and has maintained a similar pace of sales since. Its all-time Washlet sales now exceed 60 million.
The rise of Toto Washlets makes sense in the cultural context of Japan, said Masako Shirakura, an industry analyst.
In contrast to Western countries, where toilets are sometimes mocked and generally accepted as being dirty, toilets tend to be more respected in Japan, Ms. Shirakura said. This traces back to a belief in Japan that gods or spirits reside in all things, even household objects like toilets, she said.
Japan has also built a brand of capitalism, Ms. Shirakura said, that seeks to transform even minor inconveniences of modern life into business opportunities. This is evident in heated toilet seats, self-filling bathtubs and notebooks with ringed spines that flatten to avoid poking one's hands while writing.
'Japan has a very strong culture of endlessly challenging these types of things, and that's why it has been able to evolve and perfect things like Washlets,' Ms. Shirakura said.
Toto-style bidet toilets first spread to Japan's neighbors, including South Korea and Taiwan. After they expanded to China in 1994, the country quickly became Toto's top overseas market, but sales outside Asia remained elusive.
When Toto began selling Washlets in the United States in 1989, it encountered many of the same hurdles it faced early on in Japan.
The company was shut out of magazines and upscale malls that were reluctant to run advertisements for toilets, said Mr. Tamura, the president of Toto. He recalls a 2007 backlash in New York from a Washlet billboard in Times Square displaying a row of naked backsides.
By the late 2010s, Toto had built an American sales network for its Washlets, using local business partnerships, listings on Amazon and Costco store shelves. However, it was having to rely mostly on word-of-mouth marketing, and demand lagged. Toto's annual sales in its Americas housing equipment business were stuck under $300 million — less than half of its Chinese proceeds at the time.
The company saw a big shift when the Covid-19 pandemic started in 2020.
During nationwide lockdowns, Americans struggling to get toilet paper began flocking to Washlets. In 2020, Toto Washlet sales in North America nearly doubled from the year prior. That boom has carried forward, even after toilet paper stocks have replenished, Mr. Tamura said.
Toto has also benefited from record numbers of tourists descending on Japan and becoming converts. Ryan Gregory, a biology professor at the University of Guelph in Canada, experienced Washlets for the first time during a recent trip to Japan.
Initially, he was apprehensive. 'It's not a region of your anatomy that you're used to having sprayed for most of us,' Mr. Gregory said. 'I think fairly quickly you realize that North American toilets are vastly inferior.'
After leaving Japan, Mr. Gregory bought two Toto Washlets for his home. The Washlets have become a hit with visiting friends and family, he said: 'Now it's very much the case that anywhere we go it's like, 'Ugh it's not even heated, what are we doing here?''
More recently, Toto, like many international businesses, has had to navigate the whiplash of President Trump's trade policies.
Toto manufactures most of the Washlets it sells in the United States in Thailand and Malaysia, countries that Mr. Trump has threatened with additional tariffs of more than 20 percent. Mr. Trump's tariffs, if enacted, would most likely force Toto to raise its prices in the United States, Mr. Tamura said.
Even so, he said, Toto sees plenty of room for growth, since Washlet-style bidets still account for only about 2.5 percent of American toilets.
'Even with tariffs, the United States will be the biggest growth market for us,' Mr. Tamura said, adding that Toto is not changing its target of more than doubling its Washlet sales in the United States by the end of 2027.
He shared another personal goal: 'As revenge, I kind of want to try Times Square again.'