Setting washing aside
for a moment.

In the posts, I wrote that bathrooms spread into ordinary homes from the 1960s on.

That is a story about the container.

A bath coming into the house, and washing the whole body there every day, are not the same thing. Where did the habit come from?

When I looked, there were records.

An industry formed an association

In the United States, an association of companies making soap and glycerin was formed in 1926. It still exists today, and it publishes this history itself.

The following year, 1927, that association set up an organization: the Cleanliness Institute. Its purpose was to teach the value of cleanliness in schools.

It made booklets, spoke on the radio, placed advertisements in magazines, sent material to newspapers, and went into school lessons as well. Its main audience was children.

A booklet called “A Book About Baths” spends 24 pages on the manners of bathing. The morning bath. The bath after coming home from work. Bathing children. How the temperature of the water changes things.

A record of what it did over the five years from 1927 to 1932 still remains in an academic journal.

Why an industry, and not one company

When soap makers compete with each other in advertising, it is hard to pull ahead. They are all soap.

What worked better was for the industry to come together and spread the idea that cleanliness matters. If cleanliness matters, there are more occasions to use soap. Whichever company’s soap is chosen, the whole grows.

The words “soap opera”

In the 1930s, companies making soap and household goods became sponsors of daytime radio serial dramas. That was the hour that reached the people who were at home and who chose what the household washed with.

And the programs took their name from that.

The “soap” in soap opera is soap, the kind you wash with.

Inside a phrase still in use today, the way things were sold back then remains.

There are records in Japan too

In 1890, Kao Sekken (Kao Soap) was born.

The soap available in Japan at the time, it is said, was either imported, an expensive luxury, or domestic, easy to get cheaply but of lower quality. Kao came out as something domestic and of high quality.

How it was sold is on record too. Newspaper advertisements, posters, kabuki stage curtains, steamships, thermometers in bathhouses, signboards. The roadside signs it put up along the Tokaido Main Line are said to be the first railway advertising.

The bathhouse thermometer is the one I find interesting. The name is placed in the very spot where the washing happens.

All of this is what Kao writes as its own history.

So now, we can decide for ourselves

Written this way, it may sound like a story of having been deceived.

I do not see it that way.

Soap really does remove dirt. That sellers spread the idea, and that it was useful, can both be true.

There is just one thing I want to keep in mind.

When I thought “washing the whole body with soap every day is normal,” that “normal” was not something I had decided for myself.

I had no memory of deciding, and yet it was decided.

Once I knew that, I chose to set it aside for a moment.

In the posts, I set Japan’s nukabukuro (rice-bran bag) beside Korea’s Italy towel. I gave only the names, and could not write what they are.

The rice-bran bag is written about in an Edo-period book

『都風俗化粧伝』 (Miyako Fuzoku Kewaiden), published in 1813, records how it was used.

Put rice bran in a bag of silk or cotton, soak it in lukewarm water, wring it out, and wash the face and body as if stroking them.

In the public baths of Edo, rice bran was sold at the attendant’s counter. Even without bringing any, you could buy it on the spot.

The Italy towel was born in Busan in 1962

A textile mill in Busan wove cloth from viscose rayon yarn imported from Italy. The towel came out of the roughness of that cloth.

The name comes from the country where the yarn was made. So the Italy towel does not exist in Italy.

조두 (jodu) ── powder of beans and grains

I did not give this name in the posts. In Chinese characters it is written 「澡豆」.

Adzuki beans, mung beans, rice and the like are ground, the hulls removed, and the rest crushed fine and sifted. It was at the center of face-washing culture in the Joseon period, and when soap came in during the enlightenment period, it gradually disappeared.

I left the name out because the word originally comes from Chinese medical texts, and I cannot say for certain that it belongs to Korea alone. Here too, I will leave it at that.

Each of these came out of what that place had. Where rice is close at hand, rice bran. Where there is a textile mill, its yarn.

In the posts, I wrote only that “there are records from ancient Mesopotamia.” I would like to write down what that record says.

At a site called Girsu in southern Iraq, a clay tablet in cuneiform was found. It is about 4,500 years old.

On it are written the amounts for mixing oil and wood ash and heating them. It is regarded as the oldest record of a chemical reaction.

The use written there, though, was the washing and dyeing of wool.

It was not necessarily for washing the body. Researchers have not identified when or by whom it was invented. What was produced is also thought to have been an impure liquid, different from the soap of today.

So this is not a story that can be told with a date. Only this far: “for thousands of years, people have been bringing fats and oils together with alkali.”

Beyond that point, we are still doing the same thing now.

In the posts, I talked about where to look on the ingredient list.

Here I write the other side of it: the times when it is not written.

In Japan, medicated soap falls under quasi-drugs.

Quasi-drugs are not required to list all their ingredients. That is because the system approves their quality, effectiveness and safety one product at a time.

Even so, many of them do list them. That is because the Japan Soap and Detergent Association carries out full ingredient labeling as a voluntary industry standard.

It is not that something unwritten is being hidden; there was no duty to write it in the first place. And still it is written. That is a decision made by the one who wrote it.

Missing does not mean bad. When it is missing, you notice: “it is not written here.” That too is a discovery.

In the posts I wrote that “the label does not tell you everything.” Among the reasons it does not, there was this matter of how the system works.