[Anchorman]

Takeyuki Sakai, known within his company Matsushita Electric Works Ltd. as Mr. A-La-Uno, has revolutionized the Japanese toilet business once dominated by two other companies, according to Josei Jishin (7/17).

Sakai rose to his esteemed position in the world of Japanese human waste disposal by being the, er, head designer for Matsushita's self-cleaning toilet, A-La-Uno.

"A-La-Uno has achieved the unprecedented status of the toilet most designated by people building a new home," Sakai tells Josei Jishin with a laugh, adding that there have been three factors that have made the A-La-Uno such a success: It's made of a new material less prone to getting dirty; it produces fast-falling bubbles; and it has a spiral flush.

"Our technicians suggested to us that we should try making cisterns out of new materials. Nearly all household toilets until now have been made out of porcelain. The trouble with porcelain is that it's easy to have rings of dirt form from the water inside and rubbing these to clean them creates ridges in the surface. Every time you'd clean the toilet, you were actually making it more susceptible to becoming dirtier," Sakai says. "We figured if that was happening, we needed to find a material other than porcelain."

National chose glass. Not the normal stuff used with windows, but the thick, reinforced organic glass typically used by large aquariums.

"I'd always believed myself that toilets should be made of porcelain, but after I opened my mind to the possibilities of the new material, I realized it would work," Sakai says. "Once I'd got that far, we just tried all these different ideas until we came up with the product."

National assigned a 60-member team to develop the self-cleaning crapper. The team was divided into project groups devoted to such issues as cleaning fluid, water flow and bubbles. The expert on foam was dubbed Mr. Bubble, while the specialist on toilets and human waste earned the moniker of Dr. Poop, Sakai says.

Sakai says that though he studied organic science while at the Tokyo Institute of Technology, nothing during his days at TIT could have made him dream that he would become a toilet designer.

"But I have to admit that toilets are great fun," Sakai tells Josei Jishin. "I'm going to keep on striving to create wonderful feeling toilets." (By Ryann Connell)