More About Japan

As mentioned in my previous post I recently took a trip to Japan. If you have ever been or plan to go there is something you should know: in general, the Japanese love gadgets and automation. The picture above is a shot of a small cake-making machine I saw in a shop window in Kyoto. Of course we have small cam-driven machines like this in the US and Europe also, but in Japan things like this seem to be everywhere.

As most people who use automation products know, the Japanese produce quite a few of the products we use in controls design. Names like Mitsubishi, Omron, Keyence, Yaskawa, Idec, Koyo and many others are common in our control panels. But did you know that even many of the bathrooms are automated?

Of course photoeye driven water faucets, hand dryers and toilet flushers are becoming common everywhere but in over half of the bathrooms I used in Japan the toilet had a console as shown above. As there was no steering mechanism to be found and the instructions were in Japanese I did not avail myself of the benefits if this device.

I did however make use of the above device.