Our wacky Japanese friends give the world musical toilet seats.

And that's just the beginning!

Earlier this month, Toto Corp., Japan's leading toilet maker, released onto the market the Apricot N5A, the world's first toilet seat to come equipped with a built-in audio system that pipes lullabies and lyrics into the latrine.
One of Toto's developers explains why the company decided to make the melodious toilet seat.

"We conducted a survey in 2002 where we asked people to tell us what they wanted from a toilet," the developer tells Shukan Bunshun. "The most common response was a heated water cleaning system, which was closely followed by the desire for audio-visual functions."

The Apricot N5A is made up of the toilet seat and a separate remote control, which contains buttons for functions such as bidet and bottom dryer to the regular pause and play buttons normally found on audio equipment. Slip an SD card into the remote control and it allows the user to pipe stereo sound into the loo.

But that's not all the high-tech hyping for the Apricot N5A, which the weekly says makes ordinary toilets look like something out of the Stone Age. As well as being a tuneful toilet seat, the Apricot N5A also contains functions that automatically warm the seat at the same time each day, a lid that closes mechanically and a flush whose size is robotically determined depending on whether it is dealing with a number one or two.

Kuo Ue, a self-professed toilet professor and managing director of the Japan Toilet Association, has little doubt about what has made high tech toilets such a mesmerizing fascination for the Japanese.

"Japanese are a people who have placed great importance on hygiene since the olden days and really focused their attention on the toilet. There's even a saying that if you want to be beautiful, you should first clean your toilet," Ue tells Shukan Bunshun. "There's a tendency for toilet talk to be taboo in the West, so they haven't progressed."

Ue says the sky is the limit when it comes to future developments in Japanese toilet culture.

"Some of the things I can think of are toilets that take blood pressure or use human waste to analyze somebody's state of health. There's all sorts of practical research underway. Maybe there could even be a day when toilets collect methane gas and use it to create electricity or power cars," the toilet association's managing director tells Shukan Bunshun. "I'd guess that in the future, toilets will be like they were in the ecology minded city of Edo (Tokyo's predecessor) over 100 years ago -- fully recycling."
(Thanks to Mainichi Daily News for the heads up.)