And I’ll bet you thought toilets were pretty low-tech things…
A lot has been said about the fantastically high-tech toilets of Japan before, so I won’t go into that again. If you’ve read it once, you’ve read all you need to. And if you’ve never read about them, well, you’re just not reading the right pages.One thing I will comment on is the heated seats. They truly are the single best improvement anybody ever came up with for the humble toilet. It used to be that if you went into a bathroom and the seat was warm, you felt kind of weirded out. After all, you’ve got no idea whose bum it was that made it warm. With the cool, high-tech ones, you know the machine warmed it up just for you. (Or, at least, you can tell yourself that.)But this isn’t so much about the toilets themselves as it is their prevalence. It’s kind of expected that people might have the high-tech ones at home, but out in public you’ve got to make do with cold porcelain, right?
Not if you go to McDonald’s:
Not only does it have the heated seat, but it’s got the bidet, infrared flush sensor and probably some other fantastic stuff that defies imagination. What gets me (and the reason I took the picture) is that these seats cost more than a regular toilet would in the US. (I think.) And friggin’ McDonald’s has one? I guess you can do stuff like that if you don’t have jerks who get their kicks by trashing public restrooms.
Must be nice.
Maybe someday society in the US will evolve to the point where people can enjoy magic toilets and warm bottoms where ever they go. Until then it’s probably best to be choosy as to where you get your needs taken care of. And don’t dwell too much on how that seat got warm.
Especially on a cold day.