E-Paper
Ageing Japanese men worry over body odour
Japanese men are worrying about more than mere sweat as summer temperatures rise: talk of body odour caused by aging is adding to anxiety in a land that prizes being squeaky clean.
Japanese men are worrying about more than mere sweat as summer temperatures rise: talk of body odour caused by aging is adding to anxiety in a land that prizes being squeaky clean.
Being Japan, it has also sparked a range of new products, from odour-eating suits to special chewing gum.
“My wife tells me that I stink,” said company manager Atsushi Asami, 47, interviewed on a typically hot and humid Tokyo street. “I am concerned about aging odour and know there are anti-aging odour products, but have not bought them myself.”
An on-line survey by CBIC Corp., a Tokyo-based company that sells deodorant products, found that 89 per cent of 700 Japanese women in their 20s and 30s found men smelly in commuter trains.
Shiseido Research Centre, a laboratory affiliated with cosmetics maker, sparked the trend to anti-odour products for older men when it discovered eight years ago a substance that it named ‘kareishu’, or aging odour.
The lab identified nonenal, a type of fatty acid, as the cause, saying unsaturated fatty acids and oxidative decomposition increase from around 40 years of age.
