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Super Terrific Japanese Thing: Toto Washlet



I’m cheating unbelievably with today’s installment of STJT, because the Toto Washlet is in fact available in America. Right now. You can go buy one. But you haven’t and you won’t, and that’s why I’m pointing it out (and also because my buddy God Len of Japanator recently ranted on the same subject, and I totally agree with him, so now you have to hear my rant).

The Toto Washlet is basically a Japanese toilet. But it is also the next evolution of hygeniene, something virtually everyone in Japan enjoys, but for no reason at all, everyone in America thinks is insane. See, the Toto Washlet –and I’m dead serious here — cleans you after you poop, thanks to a combination water sprayer and drier. It is painless, leaves no mess, and cleans you infinitely better than rubbing barely absorbant paper on your asshole.

Yeah, I know it sounds weird. But you don’t wash your wands by rubbing a dry paper towel over them. You use soap and water. If you had shit on your hands, you’d use several million gallons of water to clean them. Yet your asshole gets no such treatment. Even if you’re too freaked out my the idea of hands-free ass-cleaning, the Toto Washlet also has: a heated seat, a slow-dropping lid (it never clangs shut), a light inside so you can pee without turning the light on in the middle of the night, and an automatic air purifier which lessens both smells and sounds.

I’ve been to Japan several time in my nerd career, and my ass was never so clean as when I was in Tokyo. Admittedly, there was one instance where all the buttons were in Japanese and I couldn’t figure out the stop button and got anally powerwashed for about 10 minutes straight. But that hasn’t happened since. Well… not by accident.