SAY what you like about the dismal profitability of Japanese firms, their huge investment in research and development produces some wonderful products. There are few better examples than Toto, the company that, with 60% of the domestic market, has something near a monopoly on lavatories in Japan.

This market is a big one, as is only to be expected in a country obsessed with cleanliness. Some 3.3m toilets are sold in Japan every year. And few are of the bog-standard sort. Toto produces some of the pleasantest and, for foreigners, most perplexing toilets in the world.

Who could resist the firm’s “Washlet”, with inbuilt bidets (for both men and women), dryers and heated seats? The most sophisticated model—and at ¥437,000 ($3,020) the most expensive—has a remote control that opens the lid before you get to the toilet, massages your bottom, kills the nasty smells and germs, and heats the smallest room. Toto even makes a small, portable bidet. But fewer houses are being built in the recession and a third of Japanese households already own such conveniences. With only 1% of its sales abroad, Toto is desperate for the next killer product.

It thinks it has found one. How about a lavatory that does all of these things and gives you a medical check-up at the same time? Early next year Toto will launch a toilet, targeted at Japan’s 6m diabetics, that analyses a person’s urine and displays on a screen the amount of sugar in the blood. The trick for the company’s 800-odd engineers and sprinkling of bio-technicians has been to develop new sensors that are sufficiently sensitive and long-lasting to pick these things up. Next on the agenda, says Seiichi Yoshikubo, a senior managing director at Toto, are toilets that can analyse the amount of protein and blood in the urine and even check the condition of the liver. The ultimate dream is the toilet that checks for cancer.

Yet like many Japanese companies that have put gadgetry before profits, Toto has fallen on hard times. Its operating profits have declined in recent years. This year, they are expected to fall more sharply. The company has announced that 1,000 jobs will be cut over the next two years and that six factories will suspend production. Toto’s president has been replaced. Sadly, shareholder value may yet spell an end to the quest for the ultimate lavatorial experience.