What do you think we Japanese need in summer?
One of the most useful items in Japanese summer is we think
katori-senkou. It protects us from mosquitoes.
Katori-senkou is known to Japanese. For example, in
Haiku(Japanese poem),
Katori-senkou is used as a word which mean summer, you know katori-senkou is one of the most important thing in Japanese summer, don't you?
Katori-senkou was born for the first time in 19th century. One Japanese got Pyrethrum(a kind of chrysanthemum) in America, and brought back it to Japan. He found that he could kill insects by burning Pyrethrum which was dried. The pyrestroid (one of the ingnedient of Pyrethrum) has the effect of killing insects.
But the pyrestloid is not included in the smoke. The pyrestroid stems before the smoke. Then the Japanese invented
Katori|Senko. Speaking of
Katori-Senko, most of people may think its shape of spiral. But at first, its shape was bar. It turned into present shape to keep burning for a long time. I can't imagine a bar of
Katori-Senko now !
But, as
Katori-Senko occurs smoke, we may strain eyes and throat and smell individual, and lately insecticides which have no smells are sold, so we get to reduce using
Katori-Senko.
By the way, when we use insecticides. We use them too much because of no smells. But those insecticides include evil chemistry matters, so they affect our health. If we use
Katori-Senko which was made of plants ( for example pyrethrum and so on ), changing over the air in the room, that influences get less.
