Post by Deleted on Mar 11, 2010 6:55:37 GMT 10
While most bathrooms in the United States are business as usual, toilets in Japan and in some parts of Europe are high-tech wonders, overflowing with luxurious amenities such as heated seats, sound effects, built-in bidets and lids that raise automatically.
But the toilets lids aren’t the only things going up. Complex commodes are also raising eyebrows, especially with Americans unaccustomed to toilets that require an instruction manual.
“You walk into a bathroom in Tokyo and the toilets are like the captain’s chair on the Starship Enterprise,” says Kim Terca, a 27-year-old public relations consultant from San Francisco. “There’s a control panel with all these buttons. The first time I saw one, I just burst out laughing. Then I started pressing buttons to see what they could do.”
Terca says she found Japan’s smart toilets both “hilarious” and somewhat perplexing, since not all toilets offer the same snazzy features — including a special deodorizing feature that she says she never figured out.
And then there are the motion sensors.
“Once, I was in a coffee shop and went back to use the bathroom and when I approached the toilet, the seat suddenly went up,” she says. “It stayed for a second and then went back down. So I kind of reached for it and it opened back up again. It was like a Venus flytrap.”
Mary, a 53-year-old business consultant from Manhattan who asked that her last name not be used, says the special sound effects were what threw her for a loop.
“I went to see my client and had to use the bathroom and as soon as I sat down, there was this sound,” she says. “In retrospect, I realized it was a rainforest or some nature sound to give you your privacy, but at the time it sounded like applause. I thought, ‘Good god, that’s what you do in toilet training!’ ”
But the toilets lids aren’t the only things going up. Complex commodes are also raising eyebrows, especially with Americans unaccustomed to toilets that require an instruction manual.
“You walk into a bathroom in Tokyo and the toilets are like the captain’s chair on the Starship Enterprise,” says Kim Terca, a 27-year-old public relations consultant from San Francisco. “There’s a control panel with all these buttons. The first time I saw one, I just burst out laughing. Then I started pressing buttons to see what they could do.”
Terca says she found Japan’s smart toilets both “hilarious” and somewhat perplexing, since not all toilets offer the same snazzy features — including a special deodorizing feature that she says she never figured out.
And then there are the motion sensors.
“Once, I was in a coffee shop and went back to use the bathroom and when I approached the toilet, the seat suddenly went up,” she says. “It stayed for a second and then went back down. So I kind of reached for it and it opened back up again. It was like a Venus flytrap.”
Mary, a 53-year-old business consultant from Manhattan who asked that her last name not be used, says the special sound effects were what threw her for a loop.
“I went to see my client and had to use the bathroom and as soon as I sat down, there was this sound,” she says. “In retrospect, I realized it was a rainforest or some nature sound to give you your privacy, but at the time it sounded like applause. I thought, ‘Good god, that’s what you do in toilet training!’ ”
Tokyo and the toilets are like the captain’s chair on the Starship Enterprise,”
Now thats somewhere i could take a crap, I must admit I never saw this feature in any Start trak episode.