In Energy-Stingy Japan, an Extravagant Indulgence: Posh Privies

Energy-guzzling toilets, which can warm and wash one's bottom, are in 68 percent of Japanese homes. (By Blaine Harden -- The Washington Post)
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The final report of the Electric Toilet Seats Evaluation Standard Subcommittee noted last year that 23 to 30 percent of Japanese men now sit while urinating. They do so, the report said, for comfort and for "prevention of urine splash."

The report also included findings from the Warm-Water-Shower Toilet Seat Council (an industry group) that women urinate eight times a day, with an average on-seat time of 96 seconds.

The government started gathering these details around 2000, when nationwide surveys of electricity use began to show that toilets had become a significant factor in the country's appliance-driven failure to contain energy use in the home.

The Japanese government is struggling to meet obligations under the Kyoto global warming treaty to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions by 6 percent from 1990 levels by 2012.

At the G-8 meeting next month, Japan will be pushing the United States and other member countries to accept mandatory limits on emissions of the gases, which cause global warming.

Since the oil shock of 1973, no industrialized country has been more effective in squeezing more affluence out of less imported energy than Japan, experts say. Relative to its economy, Japan consumes only a third as much oil as it did 35 years ago.

Industry has led the charge, more than doubling output while using less energy than it did in 1973. To make a ton of steel, Japanese manufacturers use 20 percent less fuel than their counterparts in the United States and 50 percent less than those in China.

The primary reason for efficiency gains was lack of choice. Japan is an export-dependent manufacturing economy with virtually no domestic sources of fossil fuel. In industry, fierce global competition helped compel the profit motive to marry energy efficiency.

No such shotgun marriage, however, has taken place in the Japanese home, where energy consumption has jumped by 213 percent since the 1973 oil shock. Government figures have shown that household power use has risen at almost exactly the same rate as personal spending. (Despite the rise, per capita residential emissions of greenhouse gases in Japan are only 41 percent of those in the United States.)

"Consumers won't sacrifice comfort for the sake of energy conservation," said Yasuhiro Tanaka, chief of the energy efficiency division at the agency for natural resources and energy. "Consumers won't follow that path because we are richer."

Since the government cannot stop affluent consumers from buying flat-screen televisions and super toilets, it has chosen to squeeze manufacturers, requiring them to meet increasingly strict energy targets.

In the toilet industry, progress has been impressive, with nearly every manufacturer meeting its 2006 energy-efficiency target, according to government surveys.