How did it bring someone's life in line with everyone else when they're still unable to buy the things other people can buy? Do you realise that once the cleaner is more expensive than a Japanese toilet is to maintain, the cleaner will be fired and will have nothing instead?

So the toilet cleaner retrains to become the toilet repair person? What's wrong with that? We all get better toilets out of the deal, too.

The public bathroom still needs cleaning itself, though. Unless you're suggesting that a Japanese toilet is a robot that cleans the whole bathroom? That would be interesting!

> So the toilet cleaner retrains to become the toilet repair person?

I once had a summer job as a manager of this issue - my job was to find a cleaning company and assure quality in one company building (roughly 500 toilets, around 30 cleaners). From my experience, these people were unable to properly do their jobs (not the cleaning part, stuff like opening windows so the toilet doesn't smell like acid and actually dries, not forgetting to clean something...). None of these people would be able to or would want to invest the time to learn to repair the incredibly complex Japanese toilets - they will rather live on welfare. Of course it's anecdotal and I'm sure that a lot of people will do just what you said - most certainly not everyone though, and there won't even be place for everyone, rather like every hundredth at most.

> Unless you're suggesting that a Japanese toilet is a robot that cleans the whole bathroom?

Yes, there are "toilet boxes" that can clean the whole thing including floor, ceiling and walls.

Futile - one repairman needed for every N cleaners. Same with all automation - in fact its the entire point of automation - its cheaper to use machines that require very little human intervention including repair, than humans, to do some job. Until that's true in fact, robots aren't used because they aren't cheaper. In a total cost of ownership sense.