Japanese Toilets: How to Use Them and What Every Button Does

The first time is genuinely stressful. You are sitting on a heated seat in a tiny cubicle in Narita airport, there are fourteen buttons on a panel beside your right hand, every label is in kanji, and one of them is going to do something to you. The stop button is the one that matters, and on most panels it is the large orange or red one.

A Japanese toilet, usually called a washlet after the TOTO brand that invented it in 1980, is a toilet with an integrated bidet: a retractable nozzle sprays warm water, the seat is heated, and a control panel handles pressure, position, temperature, and often a dryer and a deodorizer. Around 80 percent of Japanese households have one. They are in train stations, convenience stores, department stores, and almost every hotel.

Smart Toilet Seat

How to use a Japanese toilet

Sit down first. The nozzle will not operate unless the seat sensor detects someone on it, which is a safety feature and also the reason pressing buttons while standing does nothing.

Choose your function. The two main wash buttons are usually marked with pictograms: a rounded shape with an upward spray for rear wash, and a narrower or pink-tinted icon for the front wash, labeled ビデ or bidet. The nozzle extends from under the rim, sprays, and retracts. It cleans itself before and after use and never touches you.

Press stop when you are done. This is the single button worth identifying before you press anything else. It is normally the largest, often red or orange, and marked 止.

Dry, if the panel offers it, with the button marked 乾燥. It takes a while and most people finish with paper anyway.

Flush. On older units this is a lever on the tank. On newer ones it is a separate button marked 大 for a full flush and 小 for a reduced one, sometimes on a panel by the door rather than the seat controls.

Control Panel of Japanese Toilet

What the buttons mean

Panels vary between manufacturers, but the vocabulary is consistent.

• おしり or a rounded icon: rear wash

• ビデ: front wash

• やわらか or 弱: soft or reduced pressure

• 乾燥: warm air dryer

• 止: stop

• 音姫 or a musical note: privacy sound

• 水勢: water pressure, usually plus and minus

• 位置: nozzle position, moves the spray forward or back

• 脱臭: deodorizer

• 便座: seat temperature

Panels are either mounted on the wall beside the seat, which is common in public restrooms, or built into an armrest on the side of the seat, which is more common at home and in hotels.

The sound button

One button plays running water for about 25 seconds and does nothing else. It is called otohime, sound princess, and TOTO developed it in the 1980s after finding that women were flushing repeatedly to mask bathroom noise, wasting enormous quantities of water. A recording solved the problem at a fraction of the cost.

Many public restrooms have a separate wall-mounted otohime unit with a motion sensor, so waving a hand near it starts the sound.

Squat toilets

Japanese Old Style Squat Toilet

The traditional Japanese toilet is a floor-level porcelain basin you squat over. They are becoming rarer but still turn up in older train stations, rural areas, temples, and public parks.

You face the hood, the raised domed end, not away from it. Feet go either side, and squatting fully rather than hovering is more stable. Trousers come down to the knees rather than the ankles, since anything on the floor will regret it.

Many older facilities have one Western stall among several squat ones, usually marked with a pictogram on the door. In public restrooms it is worth checking for that door before committing.

Why Japanese toilets are so advanced

Three things converged.

Japanese homes are small, and the toilet is usually in its own tiny room separate from the bath. That makes it a discrete product to design around rather than part of a bathroom suite.

Japanese bathing culture treats washing with water as the baseline standard of cleanliness, so a paper-only toilet reads as a compromise rather than the norm.

And TOTO, founded in 1917, had both the ceramics business and the electronics ambition to combine the two. The Washlet launched in 1980 with an advertising campaign that put it on prime time television, and household adoption climbed steadily for four decades. Cumulative shipments have passed 60 million units.

The result is the only country where the toilet is treated as a consumer electronics category, with model numbers, annual updates, and features nobody asked for. Some lids open automatically as you approach. Some units have night lights, and a few analyze what you deposit.

High-Tech Japanese Toilet

Public restrooms in Japan

They are free, numerous, and generally clean. Every train station has one, as does every convenience store, department store, and park. You do not need to buy anything to use a convenience store restroom.

Some practical points:

Carry tissues. Older public restrooms often provide no paper at all, which is why people hand out packets of advertising tissues outside stations. Newer facilities are well stocked.

There may be no hand towels or dryers. Japanese people carry a small handkerchief for exactly this. Buy one in any department store.

Slippers. If a restroom has dedicated slippers at the door, change into them and, importantly, change back. Walking out still wearing the toilet slippers is the classic visitor mistake.

Queue as one line. Wait in a single queue for the next free stall rather than lining up at individual doors.

Japanese Restroom Etiquette

Accessible facilities are widespread and well signposted, usually as a larger multipurpose room with grab rails, a baby changing table, and space for a wheelchair. Signage uses standard pictograms, so the icons tell you what a room contains before you read a word.

Shibuya's public toilets are worth seeking out on their own merits. The Tokyo Toilet project commissioned leading architects and designers to rebuild 17 public restrooms across the ward, the first opening in August 2020, including two with glass walls that turn opaque when the door locks.

Can you buy a Japanese toilet?

Yes, and there are two routes.

Buy the international model. TOTO and its competitors sell washlet seats designed for local voltage and plumbing in the US, Europe, and elsewhere. Entry-level bidet seats run roughly $400 to $800, integrated smart toilets $1,500 to $3,500, and the high end well past $5,000. This is the straightforward option.

Import a Japanese-market unit. Domestic models are cheaper and better specified, but every one sold in Japan runs on 100V with a Japanese plug, so you need a step-down transformer as well as a plumbing adapter. Japanese retailers generally do not ship abroad, so people use proxy buying services. It works, and it is more trouble than most people expect.

Either way you need a grounded electrical outlet within reach of the toilet, which many older bathrooms outside Japan do not have. That, more than the price, is what stops most installations.

Portable travel washlets exist too, battery-powered handheld units that TOTO and others sell for about ¥10,000, if you want the function without the plumbing.

Toilet

Common mistakes, and what to do if something goes wrong

Pressing buttons before sitting. Nothing happens, and people conclude the toilet is broken. The seat sensor has to be triggered first.

Confusing flush and spray. On units where the flush is a separate wall panel, visitors sometimes press the wash buttons looking for a flush. If there is no obvious flush control, look for a panel by the door, a sensor pad to wave a hand at, or a lever on the tank.

Walking out in the toilet slippers. Common, mortifying, and instantly obvious to everyone.

Putting anything except paper down the pan. Sanitary bins are provided in every women's stall. Wet wipes block drains even when a packet claims otherwise.

Standing up mid-spray. The nozzle keeps going until you press stop or it times out, and the trajectory does not adjust.

If a unit genuinely misbehaves, every washlet has a manual override. Older models have a lever on the tank, newer ones a small hidden panel with a mechanical flush, and both will work during a power cut.

A short vocabulary

Worth photographing before you travel, since not every panel carries English.

• トイレ or お手洗い: toilet, restroom

• 男 men, 女 women

• 使用中: occupied

• 空き: vacant

• 大 full flush, 小 reduced flush

• 流す: flush

• 多目的トイレ: multipurpose or accessible restroom

Traveling with children

Most department stores, stations, and shopping centers have a nursing room with a changing table, a microwave for bottles, and frequently a private feeding booth. These are marked with a baby pictogram and are free.

Many stalls have a fold-down infant seat on the wall so you can put a child down safely, and some have a child-sized toilet next to the adult one. The standard is considerably higher than in most countries, and it is one of the reasons Japan is easy to travel with small children.

[Non-smoking] Bed/1-2 people (8 tatami mats, with bathroom and toilet)

Things worth knowing

Heated seats are the feature people miss most after leaving. In an unheated Japanese house in February, the toilet seat may be the warmest surface in the building.

Water use is lower than it looks. Modern units use around 4 liters for a full flush against the 13 liters of older Western models, and some recycle hand-washing water from a basin mounted on the cistern into the next flush.

Almost all units have a manual override, usually a small lever or a battery compartment, for power cuts.

Hotels and department stores have the best facilities, and a department store restroom is reliably the nicest one in any Japanese neighborhood. Many have a powder room, seating, and occasionally a separate room for changing clothes.

Where this fits on a trip

You do not need to plan around toilets in Japan, which is itself the point: they are everywhere, free, and clean, and that removes a category of travel anxiety that other destinations impose. Our guide to moving around Japan by train covers the stations where you will meet most of them.

The washlet belongs to a wider pattern of Japanese consumer technology, and our look at robots and everyday innovation in Japan picks up the same thread.

The habit of quiet functional refinement goes back a long way, as our piece on the Tokugawa shogunate suggests.

If you want to find the nearest one in a hurry, several of the tools in our roundup of Japan travel apps worth installing map public restrooms alongside stations and convenience stores.

A washlet seat is also among the more practical things to take home, and our Japanese souvenir guide covers what else is worth the luggage space.

If you are still planning the trip itself, a week in Tokyo at a local pace is a good starting point, and you will have used a dozen of these before the first day is out.