I happened to see that the venerable Ticonderoga Pencil Company had brought out a line of pencils that are “bacteria resistant” thanks to a special coating on the pencils’s surface called MicroBan™. This kind of sales gimmick is everywhere in Japan, a country where germs are so worrisome to people that it’s not rare to see someone going about their day wearing a surgical-style health mask (without or without Hello Kitty on it), even before the current H1N1 problem. The Japanese seem particularly sensitive to the thought that germs might be getting on themselves or their loved ones, and many products are promoted as being anti-bacterial, including the desks my kids study at, the sheets and pillows we use, and just about every household appliance you can think of. They even rolled out special “bacteria resistent” hand railings for escalators at major train stations in Tokyo recently.
This hand railing at Ueno Station advertises itself as “bacteria-resistant.”
