Company history

In January 1912 Okura Kazuchika, of the Morimura trading house, set up a ceramics research laboratory inside Nihon Toki in Nagoya and spent his own money trying to make the Western-style toilet in Japan. The work reached production in 1914. Where the sister company Nihon Toki (today Noritake) aimed at the American tableware market, Okura aimed at China and Southeast Asia — the “Oriental” market he wrote into the company’s name — and in May 1917 founded Toyo Toki at Kokura, near the Moji port and the Chikuho coalfields, with capital of ¥1 million.

There was no domestic market to sell into. Production failed to settle for years, losses ran through the post-WWI slump, and in 1923 the company had to write down its capital. What rescued it was the Great Kanto Earthquake of September that year: reconstruction created demand for sanitary ware where none had existed. Japan’s first Dressler continuous tunnel kiln, installed in 1920, gave the volume; quality improvements gave the company the top of the market, and 1935–37 was its prewar peak. Tokyo winning the Olympics in 1936 set the big cities digging sewers, and a Chigasaki plant followed in 1937.

The pattern was set early. Wartime work turned the plants over to military insulators; tableware production stopped in 1943. Both plants survived the war, tap fittings went into production in 1946, and in May 1949 the company listed in Tokyo, Nagoya, Osaka and Fukuoka. From the late 1950s the public housing corporation’s estates, sewer construction and the hotel boom before the 1964 Tokyo Olympics pushed sanitary-ware demand up sharply; sales passed $27.8M (¥10bn) in fiscal 1964. Roughly twenty years had been needed to build the market — and every surge in it had come from earthquakes, war recovery and state urban policy rather than from anything TOTO itself could set in motion.

By the mid-1960s the company still called itself a ceramics maker while already selling bathtubs, water heaters and unit bathrooms — a gap between what it was and what it did. It closed the gap all at once. Divisional management came in 1968, the TOTO trademark was unified across products in 1969, and in March 1970 the company renamed itself Toto Kiki and abolished its tableware division — a business restarted in 1947 and grown for twenty-three years, cut to declare a single domain: everything to do with water in a house.

The logic was market share. Holding roughly two-thirds of Japan in sanitary ware and tap fittings meant sales could grow no faster than the market itself. Widening into baths, washbasins and hot water was the way to take more of each house. New plants followed at Oita (1971) and Yukuhashi (1972), and sales reached $497.5M (¥100bn) in fiscal 1978 — a level cleared in the slow economy after the first oil shock, helped by a turn toward design, colour and higher value-added after an earnings decline.

In June 1980 came the product that made TOTO something other than a fittings company: the Washlet. A warm-water bidet seat, descended from an American medical device, sold as one piece with a household toilet had no precedent in Japan, and it took years to catch on before riding the electronics boom of the late 1980s. Its importance was never only unit sales. A sanitary-ware maker had designed and mass-produced an electronic consumer appliance in-house, and the know-how joining ceramics to electronic control would later become the electrostatic chucks TOTO supplies to semiconductor equipment makers.

Postwar growth had been almost entirely domestic, with exports a sideline. When the bubble burst and the Japanese housing market stopped growing, TOTO went after two very different large markets at once. A US sales company was set up in 1989 and local production of sanitary ware began at Atlanta in September 1991. Then, in barely two years, it assembled a Chinese network by product rather than by place: sanitary ware in Beijing (May 1994), enamelled baths in Nanjing (June), tap fittings in Dalian (July), a second Beijing plant in 1995, a sales and holding company that November, and a Washlet plant in Malaysia in September 1995.

The two bets were not the same bet. America was an existing sanitary-ware market TOTO could enter with a distinctive product; China was a market for a Japanese idea of the bathroom that did not yet exist there. What it carried into both was the Washlet — high-technology, culturally strange, and unmatched — rather than price or volume. Vietnam followed in 2002 and Mexico in 2006.

In May 2007 the company finally took the name it had been trading under for thirty-eight years, becoming TOTO Ltd. — less a tidying-up than a decision to fix a global brand in the organisation, ending the confusion of one name at home and another abroad. A regional headquarters for Asia and Oceania opened in Singapore in January 2008, and consolidated sales for the year to March 2008 reached $4.8B (¥501bn).

Harimoto Kunio became president in June 2008; three months later Lehman Brothers failed. In the year to March 2009 sales fell from $4.8B (¥501bn) to $5.0B (¥465bn), operating profit dropped 71%, and TOTO posted a net loss of $280.1M (¥26bn) — the crisis landing directly on a North American business built on the US housing market. Expansion did not stop, but its shape changed: new bases in Thailand (2009) and India (2011) ran alongside buying out partners in countries already entered, taking full ownership of the Thai plant from Siam Cement in 2013.

Under Kitamura Madoka, president from June 2013, the company answered the long decline in Japanese housing starts with what it called the remodel economy — deliberately generating replacement demand in existing homes through showrooms, tie-ups with renovation contractors and joint industry campaigns, rather than waiting on new construction. It worked: sales rose from $5.2B (¥553bn) in the year to March 2014 to $5.4B (¥592bn) four years later, and by the year to March 2022 remodelling accounted for close to 70% of domestic housing-equipment sales, with group sales recovering to $4.9B (¥645bn).

The market that failed was the other one. Chinese sanitary-ware sales fell more than 20% from their peak of $703.4M (¥92bn) in the year to March 2022 to $447M (¥67bn) three years later, as the property slump and price competition stopped the assets there earning a return. TOTO took an impairment of $227.9M (¥34bn) in the year to March 2025 and, in April 2025, halted sanitary-ware production at its Beijing and East China sites, consolidating on Liaoning and Fujian and cutting Chinese capacity by roughly 40%. Tamura Shinya, president since June 2024, has reclassified mainland China alongside Japan as a market not expected to grow, and put the growth budget into the Americas and into ceramics for semiconductor equipment — the business that began inside a toilet seat.