In an earlier blog I referred to Vikings and hippies as dirty. A knowledgeable reader pointed out that the Vikings do not qualify as dirty.
What people in the world are clean and which ones are dirty?
I have two criteria. The first is that the cleanest people in the world are Japanese. They take a long hot bath in clean water every day and they wear clean clothes everyday. They have done this throughout recorded history at every level of society.
Secondly, I look at what various people from various stations in life describe as the cleanliness claims of other people.
The Japanese were totally offended by the smell and filth of all Europeans they encountered for four hundred years from 1550 to 1930.
The people who follow the Japanese pattern of cleanliness are the Turks, the Hungarians and the Finns, all of whom have extensive public bathing facilities.
Two travelers, among many, give me an idea about England. An 18-year-old navy, Mungo Park, traveled throughout West Africa in the 1790s. He went from Senegal through Mali to Nigeria. Everywhere he went he commented on how clean the cities were, with well-designed sewage systems. He came from London, which at the time mixed fresh water and sewage in the same system. London was filthy, towns on the Niger River weren’t.
In the late 1800s an upper class English woman, Isabella Bird, traveled through the backcountry of Japan and never noticed how clean the people were. She never bathed. She never noticed the cleanliness of other people in her many European and American travels.
It appears to me that Europe, particularly England, has been a cesspool of dirty people for a long time. In our era people still joke about the French using heavy perfume in lieu of bathing. I noticed it myself when I visited as a teenager in the 1950s.
Other travellers from Germany, France and Italy to West Africa never noticed the cleanliness.
I have seen with my own eyes that children poop in the street in China.
If anyone else has measures or evidence on this subject please let me know.