I’ve got all kinds of fun little medicines in my little medicine box. I like to be prepared. When I bought them, I asked some friends about recommendations since I don’t really know Japanese medicine brands so well. Being the boring individual that I truly am, I decided to sit down today and read through the ingredients on some of these brands when I ran into these guys:
Seirogan, an all-purpose tummy relief wonder drug, kind of like Pepto. Works wonders, I’ve used it for a couple years now, and I love it to death. It came highly recommended by several of my friends. Turns out, the principal ingredient is CREOSOTE! Seriously, folks. Wood creosote.
MaakyuroBan brand antiseptic sticking plasters. I really don’t know why I didn’t question the name (transliteration for Mercuro-Band), or the fact that the bands are red in color. Perhaps I didn’t want to believe it, but, sure enough, the active antiseptic ingredient is Mercurochrome. So I’ve been dressing my wounds with mercury all this time. Nice.
I’m going to keep using them because they seem to work and nobody else using them seems to be dying, but, wow. I didn’t think anybody still made these things.
This really is pretty mundane and pointless, but that’s why it is here. Anybody else run into weird drugs when out of the old country?
It’s not a weird drug, but what the hell is up with the Japanese banking system?! I mean seriously… bank books? This is the 21st century! I can’t even check my account balance on the internets. I have to put a little book in the ATM!
I’ve often noticed, though, how living in Japan is very much like a weird combination of simultaneously living in the past and in the future. I’ve got cheap, lightning fast fiber optic internet but I heat my house with kerosene… I’ve got a bank book, but I can order a book off Amazon, pay for it at the convenience store, and get it delivered to my house in 2 days.
I am scared of Japanese medicine though, so I can’t help you there. My only medicine for the past year and a half has been ibuprofen I brought from the states :eek: It cures everything!
Not “out of the country,” but after my mother passed away, at the age of 92, I found a whole lifetime of stuff.
Like tooth powder. Yeah, you add water to it, to brush your teeth. The container had an address on it that pre-dated zip codes.
A little pile of double-edge razor blades, each one individually wrapped in paper. And a razor that used them, probably the original safety razor that my father used.
Little bottles of iodine and mercurochrome, probably from the '40s.
A bottle of aspirin from a drug store that went out of business in the '60s.
Prescriptions going back to the '50s.
A container filled with little tubes of medications, probably samples, with no indication of what they were for.
A tube of stuff that supposedly kept nylons from running.
Fasteners that, I think, attached nylons to a girdle.
Band-aids that were made of cloth, in a rusting metal container.
All kinds of cosmetics, apparently from the years of Estee Lauder’s youth.
