When I visited Japan several years ago, one of the things that both shocked and amazed me, was the bizarre toilets that they have over there. The weird toilets came in one of two categories 1) old fashioned, Japanese"squat" toilets and 2) ultra futuristic western style "washlet" toilets.

A "Squat" toilet basically looks like a urinal, laid on its back, mounted on the ground ... kind of like a small bathtub, about 2 feet long by ten inches wide. There is no seat to sit on, so the way you use these toilets is to squat over them and then let your doody drop into the trough.

This works pretty good for peeing (at least for guys), but I couldn't imagine taking a dump on one of those things ... I need to sit and think or read for a while before I can have really satisfying results.

The "Futuristic" washlet toilets are like something out of Star Trek. My wife's family has this toilet that has a built-in electric seat warmer, a built in radio, a little nozzle that squirts water to wash your arse off (like a bidet) from 4 different directions, and a built in hot air dryer that blows warm air to dry off your rear after the washing. The toilet is controlled by a keypad on an arm next to the seat, and the whole thing is computer programmable.

For example, if you know that you get up at 6:00 every morning and you don't like to sit on a cold toilet seat, you can program the toilet to warm up the seat to a specific temperature at 6 am, so you can park your naked, sleepy ass on a toasty, warm toilet seat.

The controls (except the flush handle obviously) were all in Japanese, so I was kind of experimenting and pushing buttons without knowing what they did, and the toilet actually "talked" too. You'd push a button, and a polite, female pre-recorded voice would respond in Japanese.

My Japanese isn't all that good, so I couldn't tell what the toilet was "saying", but I imagined something like "Prease to be parking honorable ass on seat! All warm now! Prease to have preasant experience! Thank you velly much!".