Lead Arrives From China: A Material and Its Fourteen-Hundred-Year Exit

Lead white reached Japan from China around the middle of the fifth century and was used thereafter as white-powder material.^[1]

That date should be held loosely. It rests on a single sentence of one abstract and is not corroborated by anything else cited here — which is worth stating plainly, because a specific-sounding century travels much further than the evidence behind it.^[1]

By the Edo period there were two grades of oshiroi: lead white and a mercury-based powder called keifun. Lead white was the cheaper of the two, and it was more readily taken up by the skin.^[2]

Read that second clause twice. The property being described as an advantage — that it was more readily taken up by the skin — is the property that made it dangerous, and it was also the cheaper option. Cost and absorption pointed the same way.^[2]

The mercury alternative is no vindication of the market either. Keifun was the dearer grade and a mercury compound, so a buyer choosing between them was choosing between two toxic metals on price — which is the actual shape of the Edo cosmetic counter.^[2]

Over an oil base — bintsuke-abura — with the powder mixed with water and applied by finger or brush to the face, the neck, the back of the neck and the chest, and not to the ears or the collarbones.^[3]

That area is the point. This was not a face powder in the modern sense but a covering of a substantial part of the visible body, which multiplies both the quantity used and the skin exposed to it.^[3]

It also multiplies the exposure of whoever applied it. A preparation covering that area takes time and hands, and in a household where one person painted another the dose was shared between them.^[3]

Home Ministry Ordinance No. 17 of 1900 prohibited the use of lead and other harmful colouring materials in cosmetics, at Article 4 — and a supplementary article held white powder back from that prohibition, expressly for the time being, because no lead-free substitute yet existed.^[4]

So the single most-cited date in this story exempted the single most dangerous product. An account of lead regulation in Japanese cosmetics that stops at 1900 has stopped one article short of its own subject.^[4]

The exemption is at least honest about itself. It says the product is held back from the prohibition for the time being and names the reason — that no substitute existed — which is a government stating plainly that it knows the material is harmful and cannot yet act.^[4]

The exemption was conditional on an absence, which made the regulatory problem a manufacturing problem. Misono oshiroi was Japan’s first lead-free white powder, certified harmless by three pharmacologists, of whom Junichiro Shimoyama and Yoshizumi Tahara are named.^[5]

The interesting precedent is procedural rather than chemical: this is recorded as the first case of a pharmacist involved in cosmetic quality certification before the Pharmaceutical Affairs Law was enacted — an expert standing behind a cosmetic claim before any statute required one to.^[5]

Home Ministry Ordinance No. 30 of 1930 ended it: manufacture permitted until the end of December 1933, sale until the end of December 1934.^[6]

The staggered dates are the shape of a real prohibition. A ban on manufacture with a longer window for sale lets existing stock clear rather than stranding it, which is how a government ends a product it has decided to end rather than announcing something and hoping.^[6]

The fifth-century arrival date is the weakest link and is flagged as such by the source that carries it. A better-corroborated date would change nothing about the rest of this article and would be worth having.^[7]

How completely the 1930 ordinance was observed is also not established here. A deadline for sale is a deadline for legal sale, and nothing cited says what happened in the years afterwards.^[8]

The relative shares of the two Edo grades are likewise unrecorded here. Lead white was the cheaper and keifun the dearer, which suggests where the volume was, but no figures cited establish it.^[8]