Sanae: Adventures in Personal Hygiene

Japanese Nose Hair Ear Pick

After a few days staying with me, Sanae finally let loose and shared her frustration with my many visible nosehairs. I'd never thought of myself as a nasal-hairy person before, comparing my mirror image with many of the folks I see around me. Still I have too much visible body hair coming out my snot hole for Sanae to tolerate. She had a pair of scissors expressly to cut nose hairs and she offered her steady hand to trim my offensive growth.

I was a bit concerned with the entire idea,

but it was kinda nice having another human being pick over your body and groom you. Even if I did get jabbed in the nose a bit, and I do have a heightened self-consciousness about a part of my body I never minded before.

Ear Pick

Besides this nose-clipping experience, Sanae had brought a gift for me: an earpick. I was astounded - a long wooden scraping utensil for an ear? Quite common in Japan, she said, mothers clean their children's ears, maybe a lover would clean a favoured aural orifice. She offered to perform this grooming for me.

As physically strange as the nose-hair clipping had been, the ear cleaning was a seriously altering experience. It involved defying a physical taboo, and the release of relaxing a physical boundary, combined with the theraputic feeling of having yourself scraped and picked. There's a great fear that this stiff object could seriously damage your ability to hear; somehow jab too deep into one of your six senses.

Her motion of gently, repeatedly scraping out my ear canal yeilded some serious dead matter, and a feeling in her victim that this experience could be a lauded sharing for intimate folks.

Sanae | Japan | trip | life

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