By Monorail
After lunch at Tanga Market, we took the Kitakyushu Monorail from Kokura Station. It’s a few stops to Kawaraguchi-Mihagino, then about ten minutes’ walk to the museum.
The TOTO Museum
TOTO, the company that makes most of Japan’s high-tech toilets, was founded here in Kokura in 1917. Its headquarters has a free museum about toilets, built for the company’s centenary. Yes, toilets. And it’s one of the best museums we went to on the whole trip.
Obviously, we tested the museum’s own toilets first.
Inside, it’s a hundred years of porcelain, told like it’s a royal family history.
Then, in the middle of it all, a motorbike with a toilet for a seat. It’s the Toilet Bike Neo, a one-off TOTO built to show off its eco work. It runs on biogas made from livestock and household waste, and it rode more than 1,000 km across Japan. The toilet is just the seat. Don’t ask.
We sat on every toilet we were allowed to.
It goes from old squat toilets and outhouses, through the first Western toilets in Japan, to the Washlet, the bidet seat TOTO launched in 1980 that changed everything.
Every era of toilet got a photo of one of us sitting on it. They’ve kept the colourful years too: purple sinks, pink sinks, blue and white porcelain.
The last stretch is today’s bathrooms, so I got in the tub.
Then back to Kokura Station, where a pink Shinkansen was waiting: the Hello Kitty Shinkansen.
Postcard from Kokura, Kitakyushu
TOTO's free museum at its headquarters in Kokura, where the company started in 1917: the history of the Japanese toilet, from squat toilets to the Washlet. About 10 minutes' walk from Kawaraguchi-Mihagino monorail station.