The whole auto-industry thing is a huge stretch. People here buy simple toilets, so if his analogy fit, that would mean Detroit would be doing well. Err...

So, I am choosing to ignore that and focus on the neat toilets.

I grew up in a cold climate and the bathroom was a nice 55 degrees on a warm day... what a great way to start the morning! So how come we never got heated toilet seats, rugs, and towel racks? I've never seen them advertised so probably nobody thought of it.

And the other reason is price. A replacement plunger/valve unit is $5.45 for my toilet. How much do those expensive toilets cost to repair?

Finally, the bidet sounds tempting. Do people actually like those things?

I spent a week in Tokyo in 2005 and "must buy Japanese toilet in my eventual house" was a key takeaway message.

It does take a few days to turn your opinion around on the warm seat issue. On a legacy toilet, a warm toilet seat feels gross because you can't help but think about how it got warm and how recently that must have been. The reptilian part of my brain took a few days to get over that; afterwards it was the second-best feature ever.

The best? Those sprays. At the risk of taking it to the gutter, which I'll try to avoid: think about a time when you might have been ill or otherwise had intestinal troubles. You may have, as I have, just stepped right off the john and into the shower to tidy up rather than deforest all of Washington state for TP. With the spray, your normal hygeine regimen steps up to "almost freshly showered" and it requires almost no paper as you're simply drying with the paper. (I never had the patience to wait for the heated fans to dry my bottom, as they work about as quickly as the old-style ones in US bathrooms, and there too I'd have to wipe my hand/bottom on my pants.)

The heated seat is good, but the spray is the business!

The first toilet I had in Japan was just a plain toilet but one thing about it was that it had a little wash basin over the tank where you could wash your hands as the tank was re-filling. Logically I could see it as being efficient and environmentally friendly but I just never could get over the idea of using toilet water to wash my hands so I never used it (i did wash my hands, just not with the toilet water).

Another takeaway - the bath that fills itself up at the exact temperature you specify and calls out to you when it is ready.

Just FYI, but you can buy the toilet seats (which are where all the goodness is) in the US, if you live near SF, LA, or NY. They cost twice as much here, though, so you're better off picking one up and putting it in your luggage the next time you make a round trip.

I've got around 3 months of experience of Japanese toilets, and I have to agree.

The warm seat and the spray take some getting used to, but after a while, you like them both.

And as sokoloff said, the spray really helps with cleaning your behind.

The far better explanation for American toilets is that as a culture, we are beyond "price-conscious", we are "price-obsessed". We want every feature under the sun in Product X, and when deciding whether to buy A's product or B's product, we very frequently do just a straight feature bullet point comparison without giving a thought to whether any given implementation of the feature is actually a quality implementation, then buy the cheapest one with our features. As long as it's just good enough to avoid being brought back to the store, we keep it, and live with the hassles forever.

Walmart are the masters of this, and it is why they have succeeded so handily. It is also why I hate to shop there; none of that rhetoric about killing businesses or anything, it's because it's cheap in the bad way, and I do care. Some. But certainly not as much as the average Japanese person.

Japanese toilets almost certainly can not succeed here, even if there was a huge demand. Why? Because an American company would produce a cheap knockoff that has the same "features", none of the quality, and half the price of the Japanese toilet, while twice the price of the current white standard. This is the toilet people would buy, decide wasn't worth the extra money because of a combination of low quality and a general "missing the point" (it's hard to explain this one, but consider one of those $30 handheld organizer things you can buy... they have all the bullet point features you want in such a product, but somehow they just royally miss the point of them all and the result is useless), and write off the entire market.

While this might sound like an anti-American polemic in favor of the wise Japanese... the reality is far more nuanced. Deciding what the proper cost/benefits ratio is a matter of personal choice, among other things. You really can't say we're wrong or right about our choices. While I am impressed at some Japanese things, my parents once hosted a Japanese exchange student touring the US, and they were equally impressed with the outcome of some of our choices, so... it's hard to say who's "right" or "wrong".

Personally, while I'm intrigued by the Japanese toilets and might install one if you just handed it to me for free, I can't imagine ever actually buying one; I'd look at it, imagine the opportunity costs of the cash vs. what little happiness it could actually bring me, and pass. That's not right or wrong... it's just a decision.

It's also a matter of timing: If you've already got a functioning toilet odds are you're never even going to think about replacing it out. If you're in the middle of putting together your dream bathroom you might consider it.

Otherwise you could say the same thing for bathtubs (Jacuzzi anyone?) and showers (rain heads, dual heads, full-body nozzles, etc.). And yes, there's a market for cheap add-ons/replacements that work with your existing setup. But they haven't driven the high-end out of business.

I didn't want to bloat an already long message, but I would think that there is at least the potential for a high-end market for fancy toilets. I was addressing the more wide-spread case. I don't think you're going to see that sort of thing become standard until a major shift occurs in American culture, or manufacturing just becomes so cheap that the extra cost for a fancy toilet (and quite likely a lot of other things) is so low nobody cares anymore. And I'd expect that second one to happen before the first.

Have you driven a "Japanese" vehicle? On my parents Honda minivan, the controls are absolutely horrible. The User Interface is a disgrace. They didn't read their Design of Everyday Things (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Norman).

It is a cluttered, clunky mess.

As far as toilets go. I just installed an Eljer (http://www.eljer.com/) this summer. While it doesn't heat your butt, it does NOT clog. It was a consumer's report pick and for good reason. It's simple, it's quiet and it works every time. And the UI is impeccable.

So before we go off half-cocked about the Japanese superiority of products, let's examine the facts. Complicated doesn't mean better.

I don't know what the dash of the particular vehicle in question looks like, but every manufacturer has a "design language" that drives their choices in external and internal appearance. Lately it seems that Honda/Acura have been embracing a very modern, technical, feature-dense design. In contrast, early/mid 2000s Toyotas favored simplicity and parts sharing, with little regard for the fact the trunk release button is a different shape, color, and texture than the radio/heat controls on the same console surface.

The domestics have really worked to bring their controls up to par in the 90s. The Honda design language is moving forward, as well, but they're optimizing for the Japanese preference for many neat features executed well, as opposed to minimalism and key features implemented flawlessly.

what are you talking about? Japanese cars have the most intuitive user interface on the market. Its the U.S. cars that you have no idea where everything is.

On the "buying experience": I went to Lowes, loaded it on a cart and paid at the automated checkout.

In my experience, all of my friends who have lived long enough in japan and particularly had such a toiled in their rented appartment (rather rare usually the owners don't spend money on this when they just want to rent you the appartment), decided that they'd buy some of those toilets for themselves eventually... It's a thing to try... Heck even my parents who came to visit now want a japaneses toilet....