New inventions are on their way from the land that brought us floppy disks and Pot Noodle. But is Ireland ready, asks David McNeill, in Tokyo.

Like many Japanese women, Mariko Fujita cringes when she has to use a public toilet. "I get really embarrassed at the thought that people in the next stall can hear what I'm doing," she says. "I wait until I think everybody else is gone before I relax and do my thing."

In a country where engineering is a fine art, there's a solution to most problems - even loo noises.

Japan's largest bathroom-appliance maker, Toto, is doing terrific business with a device called the Sound Princess, which masks the sounds of nature calling with a recording of gushing water.

"Japanese women are very embarrassed by the sounds they make on the toilet," says Toto spokeswoman Kumi Goto.

At sales of half a million and climbing in Japan, the device has proved enormously popular with bashful women and cost-conscious building managers, who lose millions of yen each year in water rates thanks to the nationwide habit of multiple flushing to drown out the natural music of the bowels in motion.

The Sound Princess has generated sniggers in less fastidious parts of the world, but Japan has a long history of exporting unlikely ideas to the West: futons, raw fish, floppy disks, Pot Noodle, Walkmans and Mario the game-console plumber have all gone on to take over an initially sceptical planet.

So if Irish folk want to know what they will be doing to their nether regions in a few years' time, they could do worse than take a peek inside Japanese bathrooms, where a slew of new products have transformed the humble loo into something resembling the cockpit of an aircraft.

Most large buildings and many homes in Japan now come equipped with heated toilets that clean themselves, fight bacteria and wash, water-massage and blow-dry the backside. Recent innovations include loos that analyse urine for signs of illness and send the results electronically to hospital computers. Some toilets will even analyse solids, if that's what you're into.

Toto began selling its luxury toilets in the US last year at nearly $4,000 (€3,140) apiece , but will they catch on in Ireland? Even if a country that still has outhouses in some parts is not yet ready to embrace the Sound Princess and remote-controlled bottom-washers, surely many a goose-pimpled Irish bum would sing for an electronic seat-warmer in winter?

Dublin plumber Richie Redmond believes the cost of the toilets is not a factor in the booming Celtic Pup.

"I do up-market bathrooms and I've seen people spend €1,000 on an ordinary bog-standard loo," he says. "I reckon people just don't know about them yet, but when they do they will catch on."

But Paul Terry, manager of Terry's Bathrooms in Cork, says Japanese toilets have until now sunk in the Irish market, and he doesn't see much hope of change soon.

"You wouldn't sell a bidet from one end of the year to another here. Gimmicky stuff just doesn't take off here. The Japanese like to have a load of electronics that they can fiddle around with. A lot of people in Ireland are still trying to get their heads around their DVD players."

And as for the Sound Princess?

"People here don't care who hears what goes on in toilets," says Terry.

Richard Moss, European communications manager for Armitage Shanks, agrees.

"A bidet is still seen in Ireland and Britain as a luxury item rather than a necessity," he says. "And as for the Sound Princess, it is worth looking at the quality of public conveniences in Ireland and the UK compared to Japan. People here are looking at saving water rather than saving blushes."

If Ireland is not quite ready for the Japanese toilet revolution, perhaps anxious parents might take to another innovation that has caused a stir here: electronic tagging of children. A private primary school in Tokyo has introduced a security system that tracks the whereabouts of its 720 pupils by equipping them with a computer chip.

A matchbox-size transmitter attached to school satchels sends a signal to a receiver at the entrance gates of Rikkyo Elementary School which is then retransmitted via the Internet to parents' mobile phones. Mums and dads can also go online and call up an image of their child passing through the school gates.

The school initially considered a swipe-card system but opted for the electronic tags after taking into account the difficulties of forcing seven-year-olds to clock in to school.

The development of the tracking system by Fujitsu follows a series of incidents at schools that have spooked parents in this otherwise safe country. In the worst incident, mentally deranged Mamoru Takuma murdered eight children at an Osaka elementary school in 2001. Rikkyo teacher Teruyoshi Ishii is confident that the new system can help prevent similar tragedies.

"We have children playing here from 6 a.m. until 8 in the evening so we didn't know who was coming or going," he says. "The system sounds an alarm when an un-tagged stranger walks through the gates and the security guards then approach the person for questioning. It gives peace of mind to parents and of course the children think the technology is cool."

To some here, the idea of tagging children like cattle to know their whereabouts is a slightly sinister development; one newspaper columnist last week bemoaned the loss of the legendary Japanese sense of community that made such technology necessary. But Fujitsu's PR manager, Scott Ikeda, who claims there is a lot of interest from abroad in the system, argues that his company is simply responding to demand.

"Of course we didn't have such things when I went to school, but this is the world we live in," he says.

Will child-tagging make it to Irish schools? Some believe it is only a matter of time.

"We already have swipe cards in some schools here, although these are not linked to the Internet," says Noel Wade, a teacher at Hartstown Community School in Clonsilla, Dublin. "And there is talk in pre-school crèches of Internet web cams so that parents can always see what is going on. So I think we're about one step away from a tagging system. If it was floated in Ireland there would be a lot of interest."

Tom Flynn, a retired teacher in Co Monaghan, agrees.

"It's a good idea from the point of view of knowing where kids are," he says. "Think of those kids that were murdered last year in the UK; they could have been found. But it's a thing that you would have to sell to parents."

If all else fails in Ireland for Japanese innovators, perhaps they'll succeed with a car made from spuds. Toyota has developed a biodegradable plastic derived from sweet potatoes and used it to make parts for a prototype hatchback car called the ES3.

The company says it is looking forward to a wide range of applications for the spud plastic, including electric appliances and household items. Some Internet wags have already dubbed the prototype car the Paddywagon.