You're listening to season 10 of Mobile Suit Breakdown, a weekly podcast covering the entirety of sci fi mega franchise Mobile suit Gundam from 1979 to today.
This is a bonus episode of Mobile Suit Breakdown, part of season 10. Some of the research we did not get a chance to do that's right, it is time at last for Nina's much anticipated, many times delayed research on diapering.
In one of the earliest episodes of Victory Gundam, a bunch of League Militaire folks, including the older members of the group, expressed surprise on seeing Carlman's cloth diapers drying on a clothesline. Which got me thinking when were disposable diapers introduced to Japan? How long did it take for them to become the main type of diapering? And before then were cloth diapers in a similar style to those used in Europe and the United States the norm? Or did they use some other style or method for dealing with infant waste? Before I get into it, special thanks to patron Fancy Wookie who went above and beyond to get me a PDF of one of the papers I consulted for this piece. It is from a now defunct medical journal and not available online anywhere. And with that I can begin There have been, across eras, cultures and regions, a huge variety of ways for dealing with infant waste. In warmer climates, infants were often left naked or with a simple skirt or tunic like garment to provide some modest covering, and they urinated or defecated wherever in medieval Europe, an infant's swaddling cloth kept them cozily wrapped up and also caught their excreta. I don't know how common it is anymore, but in China, caretakers would pay particular attention to physical cues from the infant, then hold them over a chamber pot or similar receptacle at the appropriate time. In terms of diaper like garments, there have been all kinds of different permutations of an absorbent pad plus covering, generally made from whatever materials are cheap and readily available to the region. Some examples are a chunk of peat moss covered in an animal skin or dried grasses wrapped in an old cloth, and in fact the English word diaper used to mean the pattern visible in linen and other types of woven fabric. The garment gets its name from being made from that type of cloth. Hmm. Japan's Edo period farmers frequently used a specially designed infant bed, sometimes called an ejiko. The specific name, shape and use varied by region but followed the same general structure. A small wooden trough large enough for the infant to lay flat in but not much larger, was lined with a layer of straw or ash. Then a mat made of straw or grass. Then a layer of seaweed or a cloth bag full of more ashes or rags, topped with a mattress that had a hole in it for the baby's bottom. The lower layers collected waste while the baby was kept mostly clean and dry. It had two additional benefits, the first being that farm work often necessitated leaving infants alone for extended periods of time. And this method required less active caretaking than diapering would. The second is that it was thought to provide airflow that kept infants more comfortable in Japan's hot and humid summers. There is also a long history of a diaper like garment called omutsu. One theory for the etymology of the word is that it comes from mutsuki or swaddling cloth. Another is that they are called omutsu because you could make six of them from one standard roll of cloth, with the kanji for six sometimes being pronounced or mutsu. These loincloth like coverings were typically made from old worn out kimono, not only because it was economical, but because material that had been used by the infant's parents and grandparents was thought to have protective properties like a protective charm. Plus, older material was just softer and less irritating. On infant skin, the omutsu would be covered with a cloth wrap or as the infant became more active, a shorts or pants type cover which was often made of old knitted things like sweaters or woolen undergarments. One of my sources credited industrialization with driving a change in diapering practices in Europe. As average families began to experience a higher standard of living and mass production made high value possessions like furniture easier to buy. Families wanted to protect their nice new goods from baby messes. But the biggest technological innovation in diapering at this time was probably the introduction of the safety pin, which allowed for tighter wrapping which meant less leakage. Diapers themselves would continue to be made at home from whatever material was available until mass production of diapers began in the late 1800s. Not long after outer covers made of synthetic waterproof materials, usually called plastic pants, were introduced. It was difficult and time consuming to properly launder and sanitize cloth diapers at home. Remember that this would be before home washing machines. Families that could afford to would sometimes hire a diaper service that would pick up the dirty diapers, launder them in specialized facilities and then deliver clean ones. The plastic pants I mentioned before prevented messy leaks, but caused overheating and trapped moisture, leading to dermatitis, commonly called a diaper rash. We tend to think of diaper rash as uncomfortable but not serious. But if diapers weren't changed often enough or diapers weren't laundered well enough, diaper rash could become dangerously infected. Synthetic covers never really took off in Japan as breathability was considered more important given Japan's humid climate. The earliest example I found of disposable diapers was from the UK in the 1930s and was marketed not to households but to wholesalers, hospitals and maternity homes, institutional settings. Even there, they didn't gain much traction and completely disappeared once World War II broke out. Disposables were just too wasteful at a time when cloth, plastics and industrial capacity were all being rationed. After the war, several companies and individual inventors prototyped disposable diapers or diaper liners made of paper. But most of these designs were never mass produced. Then in 1947, Valerie Hunter Gordon designed a two part system she called Paddy, a disposable pad made of cellulose wadding wrapped in cotton wool inside a reusable synthetic diaper. Initially, she made these products herself at home and made the reusable outer part out of old parachute. Within three years she had found a manufacturing company willing to mass produce the patty and had contracted with Boots, a pharmacy chain, to sell them. They remained popular until the advent of all in one disposables, such as the Pampers brand launched by Procter and Gamble in the United States in 1961. The following decades saw a number of improvements in disposable diaper design. Tape fasteners, which could be easily repositioned to adjust fit, were introduced in the 70s. The shape changed from rectangular to hourglass, which provided a better fit. Elasticated leg openings prevented leaks. Switching from rayon to polypropylene for the lining made the diaper softer and more comfortable. The discovery of superabsorbent polymers reduced leaking, made diapers less bulky, decreased frequency of diaper changes and meant that diapers wicked moisture away from the skin, so diaper rash was less frequent. Malcolm Gladwell, writing about disposable diapers in an article for the New Yorker in 2001, described how improvements in design and materials continued to shrink the diaper without compromising effectiveness. In the early 80s, they were three times bulkier than they are now, thicker and substantially wider in the crotch. But in the mid-80s, Huggies and Procter and Gamble's Pampers were reduced in bulk by 50%. In the mid-90s they shrank by a third or so. Corporations were also able over the decades to significantly reduce the relative cost of disposables. I don't know why it's lodged in my brain, but I have a very clear memory of a scene from the TV show Mad Men where several people in the office are discussing a new disposable diaper product, and one quips that at 10 cents apiece you kind of think you should reuse them, highlighting that at least initially, disposable diapers were too expensive for many consumers to use them as the only or even the primary form of diapering their babies. Adoption of disposable diapers in the US and Europe occurred gradually, picking up steam in the 70s. The marketing pitch focused first and foremost on convenience, similar to home appliances. That highlighted the time savings for homemakers, but a close second was to quote the Wikipedia mothers increasingly wanted freedom from washing diapers so that they could work and travel. Disposable diapers were seen as freeing women from a task that functionally shackled them to the home. Finally, with their high tech materials and ease of use, disposable diapers were also seen as modern. One source that I found a few scans of was a corporate publication from Robinson and Sons, the manufacturer of the Patty. In this book of corporate history, Peter Wyder the tremendous success of patty through the 1960s accurately reflects the mood of the time. The last vestiges of post war austerity had been consigned to the waste bin along with the torn remains of the hated ration book, and a new, modern, forward looking age dawned. Plastics were not only increasingly popular, but even became fashionable. And with higher incomes and more opportunities for leisure, disposability became a positive virtue no longer tainted with wartime notions of waste or laziness. He goes on to write that by the 1990s, 95% of nappy changes in Britain were made with disposables. In Japan, disposable diapers were, if not widely known, at least written about as early as 1954, though it wasn't until 1977, when Pampers began to advertise in Japan, that they reached broad public awareness. Pampers themselves were initially a flop. They hadn't adapted their advertising at all to account for cultural differences.
Oh no.
The imagery of a stork delivering diapers left most Japanese consumers scratching their heads. Nor had they adapted the product. The packaging was inconveniently large for most Japanese homes, and the range of sizes offered didn't suit the average sizes of Japanese infants. To quote a business case about Pamper's efforts to make inroads in the Japanese market, Japanese producers known for quality and innovation began to overtake the Americans by creating diapers more suited to smaller Japanese babies and packaging more suited to smaller Japanese apartments. They also developed more effective materials to absorb liquid and prevent diaper rash. Japanese made diapers were indisputably better, and by 1983 they were driving Pampers out of business. Incidentally, Pampers retooled their ads and products and did manage to maintain a Japanese presence. But they have never dominated the Japanese market in the same way they dominate the US Market. They really only have one rival in the United states. As of 1987, disposables were only 25% of the diaper market in Japan. One source credits climate, economic concerns, and cultural attitudes about baby care as being the main factors slowing Japan's adoption of disposable diapers as compared to the pace of adoption in Europe and the United States. The trade off between water tightness and breathability was particularly difficult to manage with disposables, and Japan's climate meant that many mothers prioritized breathability. It took a long time for disposables to compete in this regard. Disposables were also seen as wasteful, an unnecessary expense when homemade cloth diapers cost nothing. Nothing but the time and labor of the homemaker anyway. I've discussed in previous research pieces some of the difficulties Japanese women encountered in the workforce and the general expectation that even if they worked beforehand, women would cease to work outside the home if they had children. And aside from the emotional resonance of once old clothes being used to protect one's baby, the process and materials associated with cloth diapering, everything from putting the diaper on the baby to the laundering, the air drying, all of it was seen as cultivating the bond and connection between mother and infant. Natural materials, natural processes, natural relationships.
Shakti uses cloth diapers, but Queen Maria would definitely have used synthetic ahem.
Hem. Still, by the late 1980s, many young mothers in Japan were using both cloth and disposables, choosing between them as the situation dictated. The author of the History of Diapering in Japan piece, Konogoro, speculated that adoption of disposable diapers in Japan would speed up once the healthfulness of disposables became more widely known and as adoption became more widespread, it would reach a tipping point where disposables became the norm, and then that norm would be self reinforcing through the social pressure of Japan's relatively homogenous society. We know that Tomino was interested in how the pace and scope of change in Japanese society after World War II created a deep gulf between generations The Victory Gundam scene I described at the beginning of this piece may be one more expression of that. But think about what a presence Karlman's diapers are in Victory, how often Shakti is shown washing them. My initial impression of the cloth diapers was that they told us about the lives and attitudes of those living in that their relative poverty and isolation prevented them from taking part in contemporary consumer culture, that they were good at finding cheap solutions to problems with whatever materials they had on hand, and that cloth diapers were better suited to their old fashioned, off the grid living. But it turns out that more important than any of that is that cloth diapering and seeing Shakti engaged in the whole process of changing Carlmen, washing the cloths, hanging, the drying, all of it reinforces Shakti as this earth mother figure, someone ultimately maternal.
I'm actually really glad that you didn't get a chance to do this until the end of the show, because now we can look back on the whole season holistically and a few things start to emerge from that that wouldn't have been so obvious if we had covered this, you know, at the midway point or so. And one of those is the diapering of Carlman is not a standalone element of the story. It exists in contrast with the occasional references to the toilet packs of the normal suits and that whole episode where they blast the Zanskar fleet with a diarrhea ray. While it is somewhat demeaning to think of them this way, all of those pilots, all of those astronauts up in space are wearing diapers, garments designed to allow them to relieve themselves without taking any clothes off and to sequester the excreta away from their bodies for comfort and sanitation. And what is a toilet pack except the ultimate expression of the synthetic disposable diaper? You fill it up, you dispose it, you attach another one. Even in this most gross, squishy way, Tomino is still hammering those. The contrast between the idealized rural, small village life that the people of Casarelia are trying to protect and get back to versus urbanized, hyper industrialized, futuristic space civilization. And in going into space, in a way, people are reverting to the state of infancy, reverting to a state when they need to be diapered, which is also what the Angel Halo purports to do to them.
At the same time that disposable diapers for infants were starting to gain some traction in Japan, they were almost simultaneously developing and selling disposable diapers for the elderly and for elder care purposes. I did not see much mention of that for Europe and the United States. But again, you have this caretaking task that through modern technology, corporations are attempting to make it simpler, less time intensive. Obviously that specific doesn't come up in Victory, but it feels tied in with the whole, like natural life cycles. And we need to be taken care of when we're babies and we need to be taken care of again when we're very old and well.
It reduces the care burden to switch to synthetics and disposables, which on the one hand has the effect of freeing people up to do other things, but it also weakens the bonds of interdependence between people.
I can understand how all of the caretaking acts, even the slightly gross, like the changing of a diaper, help strengthen the bond between a caretaker and an infant. I think that's true whether the caretaker is their mother, their father, a babysitter, a family member, whoever. It's harder for me to understand why it would necessarily need to be a cloth diaper for that bond to be strengthened properly, and why the laundering is also seen as like an important part of strengthening that bond. Maybe there is a perspective that just it is another task about the baby. And the more time you spend doing tasks related to the baby and thinking about the baby, the stronger your bond will be with the baby. I don't know about that. We're not here to discuss the pros and cons.
No, to be clear, we are talking about Victory Gundam. We are talking about Tomino's ideology as expressed through, through this TV show.
It serves this kind of simultaneous purpose of showing us Shakti as a very hardworking, resilient and resourceful young person, that she has taken on this task and she handles it. And one of the things that I really appreciated in Victory was this the story structure that kind of kept hammering home the coexistence of life at war with just like regular life continuing. I think more than once. She is in the middle of laundering diapers when some like, enemy force comes upon her or, or flies overhead. The fact that they are in the middle of a war zone doesn't change that the diapers need to be washed.
It emphasizes how war functions as an artificial imposition into this peaceful daily routine. And I think we can agree that when speaking sort of about caretaking tasks, anything you do for another person, the more time, the more effort that it takes, the more meaningful it feels to receive if you are making somebody a delicious meal, to speak about inputs rather than outputs, it is much more meaningful. If you cook it yourself, even if it turns out bad, than if you just call for delicious takeout. Both of those result in everybody getting to eat a meal, but making it yourself feels more meaningful.
There is a logic to it. There is a logic to the elevation of these tasks.
In the same way that Shakti actively carrying Carlman herself is more meaningful than than if they had a hover crib that just followed them everywhere. But of course, the time saved using disposables instead of cloth diapers could then be spent on other meaningful, caretaking, bond affirming activities.
And it's not as though we weren't aware of Tomino's hang ups about the concept of working mothers.
Oh sure, look, the fact that it's always Shakti washing out the dirty diapers in the stream, like that's not accidental. There's a clear pattern here. And from the very beginning of the show, Shakti is typecast as little girl Mommy.
One of the big surprises of Victory Gundam being that this is meant to contrast her with her own biological mother.
Or as USO might put it, shaking his fist at her. Just having a child doesn't make you a mother. It's worth mentioning here in 1992. So between the releases of F91 Gundam and Victory, Tomino helped out on another Sunrise anime. He did the storyboards for the opening for a show called Mama Is a fourth Grader. The premise of the show is that due to a rift in space time, a little timey wimey nonsense, a woman's baby is sent back in time from 2007 and lands in the living room of the mother, but when she was a child. And so this fourth grade girl is left raising her own child.
Huh?
And I can't help but wonder if maybe this had some influence on Tomino's thought process when he decided to make Shakti into like child mother character.
This could be illustrative of some very strange and uncomfortable ideas about motherhood, but it's worth remembering that when Tomino was a child, it was still very common for quite young children to be looking after infants. I believe I talked about this when I did my huge research piece on like the concept of childhood, but that in essence, for a lot of Japanese history, childcare was done by children who were old enough and big enough to like carry a baby around, but not old enough to do other work. And so you probably would have had children who were the approximate age of 4th graders looking after infants. It wouldn't have been their own baby, but they would have had substantial responsibility for caretaking at that time. And we know that Tomino felt a certain amount of of confusion about like the new younger generations, a sense of wanting to understand them, but also, I think a certain amount of knee jerk judgmental reaction to them as sort of spoiled or disconnected, while at the same time understanding that that was in large part thanks to their upbringing and they hadn't raised themselves.
Both of these series recreate that traditional childhood experience that Tomino and his contemporaries, I think the director of Mama, as a fourth grader is just a little bit younger than him, would have remembered from their own childhoods. It would have been familiar to them, it would have been familiar to their parents. But now, by the time they are adults with their own kids, they see a generation that has no experience or memory of having done that. And so through various sci fi contrivances, through in one case magical time travel, and in the other case through the tragedies of future space war, children are once again cast back into what the creators may have thought of as their natural roles.
Yeah, anyway, it turns out a diaper.
Not just a diaper, the diaper is a lens. Let us all look through the diaper in order to see the truth. Hold it up real close to your face. Mobile Suit Breakdown is written, recorded and produced by us, Tom and Nina in scenic New York City within the ancestral and unceded land of the Lenape people and made possible by listeners like you. The opening track is Wasp by Misha Dioxin. The closing music is A Long Way Home by Spinning Ratio. You can find links to the sources for our research, the music used in the episode, and additional information about the Lenape people and more in the show notes on our website gundampodcast.com if you'd like to get in touch with us, you can email hostsundompodcast.com or look for links to our social media accounts on our website. And if you would like to support the show, please share us with your friends. Leave a nice review wherever you listen to podcasts or support us financially@gundumpodcast.com Patreon you can find links and more ways to help out@gundumpodcast.com support thank you for listening. Sorry, sorry.
Oh no, we missed all.
You missed my. You missed my mumble singing of Modern Major General.
We watched Pirates of Penzance recently. The one that's got Kevin Kline and Linda Ronstadt in it.
And Angela Lansbury.
You can't deny Angela Lansbury.
Never. She was definitely in it apparently, it made an impression.
It was a really good movie. Joyful. A joyful movie.
All right, Are we ready to begin?
I sure am.
In one of the earliest episodes. Oh, should we do some kind of intro for these? Or should we just, like. Like that? This is bonus research or whatever.
Sure. Yeah, that's a. That's a good call. I will introduce it.
Okay. Sidebar. I thought I was gonna try to, like, go to a World cup match when they were here in the US.
Because, like, they're all ludicrously expensive.
It's like $1,500 minimum for one person. Like, it's very exciting and be cool experience to have. But I don't want to pay, you.
Know.
Fifteen hundred dollars plus travel, because those. The cheaper tickets are impossible. Places that are far enough away. Like, I'd need to go to Boston or to Houston. You know, the one that's in New Jersey is more like 2,000 a piece. Like, no, I don't want to go that badly. Yeah, Sam.