Another BAND-AID in Japan "LIBATAPE" has Century Long History

A man has his history, so does a product. Here's a Japanese product with a long history that dates back to the Seinan War (1878), the last civil war in Japan. The following is an episode of how BAND-AID's formidable rival ever came to life.

Those of you who have visited Tokyo may know that huge bronze statue of a kimono-clad man walking a dog on a lead in Ueno. Takamori Saigo is his name and he is a hero who died an honorable death in memory of the fading Samurai class in the eve of Meiji.

Now, in the last stage of his struggle against the government was the Battle of Tabaruzaka, Kumamoto, in which an army surgeon was fatally wounded. The surgeon, Arima by name, was nursed in a nearby villager's and in his death bed, he handed to the family head, Kamejiro Hoshiko by name, the prescription for a a proprietary medicine as a token of gratitude.

The following year, Hoshiko turned the prescription into a bone-setting plaster, which led to the founding of Libatape Pharmaceutical Co. in 1972. The company began marketing Libatape in 1960.

The company was born out of a war; so was Libatape. Kamejiro's grandson Yoshinori Hoshiko was taken prisoner in the last war, and he came across with US Army first-aid bandage. Alert as he was, Yoshinori came up with an idea: gauze atop vinyl chloride film. In 1960 the idea was commercialized into a product named Libatape.

Libatape was a failure - at least in the early stage of marketing it was thought to be a failure, when the standard formula for emergency first-aid then was combinations of gauze, bandage and iodine tincture. Their marketers commissioned "traveling medicine salesmen"who would leave "Medicine Kit" at each household on a "pay-for-what's used" basis. This was a breakthrough.

Today, Libatape is a local dialect in Kumamoto; Libatape goes for every other brand including, of course, BAND-AID. It's a super band-aid, give it a try.