Chapter 361 20. The Big Business of Personal Hygiene

"How did the little girl know I took a bath?" Xiao Pingtai in the corridor was a little dizzy.

Back in the Japanese-style room, "Xiao Pingtai, did A Ling say what to eat for dinner?"

Xiao Pingtai looked at his old father-in-law, who was writing and drawing something there, and suddenly thought of something. The men that A Ling usually contacts most are Hosokawa Harumiya and Hosokawa Nainou, father and son. What is the difference between them and herself?

He said maliciously, "We'll eat Tsukudani tonight." Then he slowly approached Hosokawa Harumiya, and Xiao Pingtai sniffed fiercely.

Got it!

Hosokawa Harumiya, who is already sixty years old, has a "dusk air" on his body. It's not a bad smell, but a smell that is hard to describe.

"How often does the old man take a bath?" "Hmm? About once every ten days. What's the matter with you asking this?" Hosokawa Harumiya raised his head, a little strange, you, a man, asked me, an old man, how often I take a bath.

"How many days ago was the last time?" "Last night." The old man looked puzzled, but Xiao Pingtai had already understood it in his heart.

If a person doesn't take a bath for ten days in summer, I think everyone can understand this situation.

When Hosokawa Cainu came back from duty, Koyata also pretended to get close to her brother-in-law and sniffed him gently.

"Koyata, what are you doing!" Hosokawa Cainu had always been at odds with Koyata. He always felt that Koyata was actually a peasant, not as good as him, who was born into an aristocratic family for hundreds of years.

"It's okay, it's okay, brother, how often do you take a bath?" Koyata retreated immediately and pretended to be fine.

Hosokawa Cainu seemed to understand something, raised her left and right hands and smelled them. As if she smelled something, she stood up and walked out in a hurry.

"How often does brother take a bath?" Koyata grabbed a maid and asked.

"Cainu gets up every morning to practice spearmanship, and after practice, she will wipe her body with cold water. As for bathing, it is once every ten days." The maid answered truthfully.

As expected, Hosokawa Cainu, who came back from duty every day, might still be clean in the morning, but it was hard to say at night, and her clothes were not changed every day.

After all, it costs twenty or thirty to buy a sweatshirt on Taobao now, and everyone has more than ten or twenty pieces in the closet. In ancient times, even a high-level samurai like Hosokawa Saijo, who had three thousand kan, definitely did not have twenty sets of summer clothes.

Clothes were one of the most important assets in ancient times. He did not have the capital to change clothes every day, and naturally it was impossible to change clothes every day, even in the hot summer with a temperature of more than 35 degrees.

Xiao Pingtai recalled his original owner again. When he was poor at the beginning, he did not take a bath for a long time. But after he traveled through time, he made some money and had an earthen stove in Uncle Tsunayo's house.

He started to take a bath almost every day, although it was just to boil a bucket of hot water and use cotton cloth to wipe the whole body. Later, he became a middle-level and high-level samurai. Except when he was fighting outside, he could usually use a large wooden basin to sit in the basin and wash well, and he didn't need the money for firewood.

As for changing clothes, Xiao Pingtai was indeed not diligent in changing outer clothes, which could not be helped, but Xiao Pingtai had more than a dozen cheap cotton cloth inner clothes, and he would change them almost every other day.

Now it was clear. Although Kobayata's personal hygiene was OK, most samurai didn't have the habit of taking a bath every day. Kobayata was with samurai with all kinds of smells every day, so he was used to it.

A Ling was a girl, so her sense of smell was more sensitive. She suddenly found a man without smell among all the men with all kinds of smells.

At least the first one looked good, right!

...

Personal hygiene is so important! It's so important that you can find a wife. Kobayata suddenly thanked the kindergarten teacher for taking a bath, cutting nails, saying thank you, and saying hello. The education in childhood really affects a person's life.

From this day on, the samurai in the Kanjo Bugyosho received a strange order.

You must take a bath every ten days! Check regularly!

Kobayata also realized a business, opening a bathhouse! It is undeniable that bathrooms have become popular in Japan from the Warring States period to the early Edo period.

But now the bathroom is a sauna, and it does not provide showers and baths. All I can say is that you are given a bucket of hot water when you enter the bathroom, and you wipe yourself, that's all.

Of course, this kind of bathroom has a very popular service, which is to hire a bath master. And the bath masters are not men, but young women. This bath is also dirty, which is exactly the same in ancient and modern times, at home and abroad.

Let's do some calculations. Boiling water for bathing at home alone, the heat dissipates quickly, and firewood is expensive. So how did single families bathe in the Edo period?

Do you know about the Goemon bath? [Note 1]

Build a stove at home, put a big iron pot, boil a pot of hot water, and the whole family takes turns to bathe.

Before Kobayata traveled through time, he had taken such an iron pot bath once, which was a very wonderful experience.

For single families, this is not cost-effective. But bathing is also a necessary thing in people's lives. If Kobayata can directly launch bathing and showering, although it is hard to say that it will be very popular, at least there will definitely be customers. No one wants to meet people dirty and smelly, right?

Moreover, boiling a large pot of water and building an insulated room to reduce heat dissipation can greatly reduce the cost. There were a large number of public baths in Kaifeng during the Song Dynasty in my country. Wang Anshi often met with Han Wei to take a bath, and it is said that they would recite poems while taking a bath. As for whether they took a sexually explicit bath, it is unknown.

There is no technical requirement to open a bathhouse. You can open it as long as you can boil water. Besides, there is a Lianchuan outside the Yamanouchi Fuchu Castle. There is no problem with water supply. Just hire a few people to fetch water.

Moreover, Xiao Pingtai is not going to do it by himself. It is not a problem to open a bathhouse and make a few hundred kan a year. [Note 2] This amount of money is not a mosquito leg. You can take it seriously.

First, pull in the old father-in-law Hosokawa Harumiya, and then pull in the old boss Yamanouchi Yoshiharu. The three of them will open a bathhouse together. Even if each person can only get 200 kan a year, it is still a lot of money.

You can even give the samurai a free bath ticket every month to coax them to come first, and wait until the winter when the temperature is minus ten degrees, and see who can forget the pleasure of taking a bath.

As for the side business of taking a bath, it can also be started. The Tokugawa Shogun family does it, so why can't Xiao Pingtai do it?

[Note 1]: It is rumored that Toyotomi Hideyoshi once boiled the thief Ishikawa Goemon alive in a cauldron, so the bathtub in the Edo period, or actually an iron pot, was called this name.

[Note 2]: In the Southern Song Dynasty, Hong Mai's "Yijianzhi" mentioned that even an oil seller could accumulate a fortune. Selling wine, flowers, and even manure could make money. It was just a matter of how much or how little.