“It was the most embarrassing experience of my career,” he says. The diplomat began to clean up the mess on all fours with a wad of paper. Disheveled, but not discouraged, he then pressed a third button, that of anal cleaning, which brought out a small robotic arm in the middle of the toilet seat, followed by a powerful jet of warm water which flooded the floor and his clothes.

He then pressed the button that triggers the blower to dry the buttocks. He first pressed the button which makes the sound of a waterfall, to mask the annoying noises and which is called “the sound of the princess”. There were ten of them, on a dashboard as complicated as that of a fighter plane.

In 1997, an American diplomat invited to eat with Japanese people politely got up from the table to go to the bathroom, did his business, and began to look for the flush button. In previewing an exhibition of Harukawa’s work at the Museum of Eroticism in Paris, Liberation newspaper put the art in context of the Japanese bathroom experience, retelling the Washington Post story (“But Do They Flush? Japan’s High-Tech Toilets Do Nearly Everything, Even Redden Faces”) of the young US diplomat in the land of the rising sun. In Japanese the word “clean” ( kirei ) also means “beautiful”.