3:47 pm HKT Feb 10, 2015
Derrière Diplomacy : Chinese Consumers Swamp Japanese Toilet Stores
The array of choices offered by Japanese toilets has charmed Chinese consumers. Armin Kübelbeck via Wikimedia Commons
Call it backdoor diplomacy. In what might be called a sign of easing tensions between China and Japan, Chinese shoppers have been flocking to their island neighbor in droves to snap up toilet seats.
Lest one should be inclined to pooh-pooh, these are not commodes of your grandmother’s variety. They aren’t even the simple single-stream sprays, which are to the bidet world what Neanderthals are to human evolution.
These bidet toilet seats are masterpieces of Japanese creativity and consideration, featuring warm water options, heated seats and the ability to kill germs and unwanted odors. News segments on the shopping frenzy shown on Chinese state television showed a Japanese store manager bemused by herds of Chinese tour groups who take just one afternoon to clean out, so to speak, his entire store. Price per bidet? Just 2,000 yuan ($320) a pop.
The Japanese have long been among the world’s finest purveyors of bidet sprays. In Japan, bidets have, if anything, an excess of features. China Real Time stayed in a Tokyo hotel last year that included a remote control, as if the designer believed its user could have been located somewhere beyond the immediate vicinity of the spray.
This being a Sino-Japan matter, even toilet seats carry political meaning. Perhaps in keeping with warmer bilateral ties, some of the commentary took a friendly tone.
“Boycotting Japanese products does not work,” a columnist wrote in the state-run China Youth Daily, the official newspaper of the Communist Youth League. “Japanese goods have permeated every aspect of our lives. If you want to boycott everything, I’m afraid you’ll have to throw away your identification cards, cellphones, land-line phones, elevators, some of which have Japanese components.”
But for others, old habits die hard. An opinion piece in the Communist Party newspaper People’s Daily questioned: “Do Japanese toilet lids smell better?” and excoriated Chinese buyers of Japanese bidets as “blindly believing that foreign goods will certainly do better than Chinese goods.”
“Hopefully our countrymen will buy Chinese products, because supporting our country’s industries – isn’t that a kind of patriotism?” it said.
–Chuin-Wei Yap
