tangential, but I don't understand why keeping your shoes on in your house is a thing. It's so unsanitary. The bottom of your shoes are in contact with things like the floor of public bathrooms, animal feces (when walking on grass), dirt, mud, etc.
And it's so much more comfortable to be in your house barefoot, with socks or with slippers.
So much cleaner. I'm disgusted when people try to walk in my house with their shoes on.
Coming from a shoes-on culture I can give a couple points.
First, in the rare cases you describe (when was the last time you stepped on feces?) one would indeed leave their shoes outside. But in the day-to-day your shoes have some dust on them and that's it - you won't even notice it's there when compared to the dust that already accumulates daily. If you live in a climate where this assumption doesn't hold (snowy areas come to mind) then the equation changes.
Second, the floor is usually stone and therefore designed for being walked on with shoes. I would feel awkward walking on some polished wood, but if the difference between inside and outside is "this one is less coarse but just as hard" then I wouldn't see a good reason for taking my shoes off. I would probably avoid the rug, but that's me.
As for comfort, keeping your shoes on also means one less thing to do when going in and out. Do not underestimate the path with less friction.
I have seen in Switzerland that people leave their shoes at the entrance and switch to house shoes. Or they use a shoe cover when they enter house with shoes. Probably because houses are mostly wooden floored.
Between "Most of the west" and "Asian countries" it seems like it's the vast majority of industrialized countries that take off or swap their shoes inside. There's just an odd blip of over-represented online people who don't.
Try this , when was the last time you stepped somewhere that had previously been stepped on by someone who had walked on a spot which had been stepped on by someone who may have stepped on a spot trod on by ... go far enough back and it's all had feces on it to some small degree.
An easy way to keep this concept clear and understand the reasoning behind a 'leave the outside shoes out of the house' is something learned as a child.
Just like there is a Law of Conservation of Mass, and a Law of Conservation of Energy, and these two are the same law as defined by Einstein, there is also a Law of Conservation of Filth. The law may be stated as: "A spoonful of wine in a barrel of pigshit is a barrel of pigshit. A spoonful of pigshit in a barrel of wine is... a barrel of pigshit."
Taking off the outdoor shoes to come indoors changes the "is there trace amount of feces on my dining room tatami floor?" risk from "I cannot be reasonable sure," to "I can be reasonably sure that there is none." If guests find that too much friction to understand and accommodate, one might argue for a different set of guests who are less accepting of an allowable amount of pigshit in their wine.
I'm going to disagree with your law of "conservation of filth" on the grounds that it's pushing things too far. Whatever amount of feces comes into your system via walking downtown on a regular day and then bringing the shoes inside pales in comparison to the amount of fecal matter that enters via your toothbrush if you keep it in the bathroom. At some point a small amount of dirt is just fine, as evidenced by my immune system not even visibly reacting whenever I pick up and eat something that fell on the floor (as long as I follow the five-seconds rule). And people do go out to restaurants or, even worse, picnics, where all that separates their food from a much filthier surface is a piece of cloth.
I'm not going to say that every type of floor is to be walked on, with rugs and tatami mats being perfect counter-examples. But if a five-star restaurant doesn't ask me to take my shoes off (not evening Japan, AFAIK) then keeping them on is, from a sanitary point of view, probably okay.
The toothbrush analogy is weird, and untrue in most cases. And regardless, just one time stepping in crap, would make up for a lifetime of a few molecules hitting a brush at random intervals.
And of course, toothpaste is a cleaner, so it's not relevant.
But I find this all amusing, because wherever you take your shoes off? That's where all this supposed crap sits from all these shoes left outside. Which means you are walking in your socks in that area, after shoe removal, and entering the house.
So unless you levitate out of that area, your feet are still covered in this supposed crap.
The shoe rule in Japan stems from damaging floors. And checking your feet, shoes or not, is just prudent. But your feet or clean looking shoes?
The living area is usually elevated and so you can simply sit down, take off your shoes, and easily change into slippers that are ready at the edge of the living area. Or, one simply steps out your shoes (easy enough at least with sneakers) and to the living area. Easy to do unless one is infirm.
No, you actually step out of your shoes an up to a wooden platform which shoes never trod. And yes, the top and even many middle level dining establishments in Japan actually do require guests to leave their street shoes in an entry way, called a Genkan.
Nobody steps with their socks onto shoe trodden surface. It's not a complicated but of geometry, you loosen your foot in the shoes to make them ready for stepping out from, then step up onto a raised and dirt free platform, then if you have good manners, turn around, lower yourself, and use one hand to collect and turn your shoes so that they are not in the direct line of traffic and are facing away from the house, so that one may step into them from the wooden platform without needing to step backwards as you exit. This is amazingly simple, done by literally millions of people every single day, multiple times, and has been this way for centuries in all kinds of weather and many styles of shoes.
There is no dirt tracked in on your socks, there may be some 'stepping on the top of your own shoes' if you are in a rush and clumsy or a child. But grown ups rarely have much difficulty with this unless they are visiting from somewhere else and cannot be observant. Nearly every doorway in the country also has a handy long handled shoehorn to ease the donning of your shoes without requiring a seat. Community centers and elderly homes and some households with elderly residents will also have a small stool that is at an oblique angle between the 'dirty' shoe level and the clean wooden platform, allowing one to sit and take off shoes, then swivel without putting feet onto filth and stand again in the clean.
I'm frankly astonished at the seemingly purposeful denseness of comprehension for a simple act of cleanliness. The 'filth will make us stronger' approach reminds me of the historical writings of the 10th-century Arab diplomat Ahmad ibn Fadlan, who chronicled the Volga Vikings (Rus') and was the inspiration for the 'Viking morning bowl' scene from the movie The 13th Warrior. Just 'Ewww'
The toothbrush is a moot point if you have a separate be bathroom and toilet. If they are combined the spread of fecal particles is curbed by flushing the toilet with closed lid. And in the end the toothbrush is flushed before using and then coated with toothpaste, which often contains detergents and microbial agenda, and which is finally flushed out.
I don't think you can conclude from that incident that all soap is always contaminated. And even if it's not perfectly clean, in the end ist's all flushed away.
I don't really get what your point is. Are you regularly eating from the pedestrian way?
My point was that you seemed incredibly positive that Japan houses o'clean, and the rest of the world is as apes, in caves, picking parasites off of each others backs.
This obsession with shoes, doesn't cover the fly droppings, the dirt upon clothing, and the fact that your body is always covered in bacteria, your gut filled with bacteria, your lunch covered in it if you ever eat fresh greens, you will die without bacteria.
I'm not suggesting you walk around with dirty shoes, that's silly. Yet I feel you are a city dweller, because the world is made of dirt, and a rural farm worker spends all day in it.
To no harm to the worker.
Dirt is natural. Concrete is not.
So my point was just, you seemed a little upset at dirt.
I just don't get why you treat this as something super complicated. There is street and nature level dirt which contains an unknowable degree of contamination that can be unambiguously bad for you if you ingest it, no matter what that BBC article says, and the inside areas where people eat and sleep. The vast majority of cultures prefer to maintain that separation and to maintain a considerably higher level of cleanliness in the living areas, no matter if it's not at semiconductor fab level.
Specific to Japanese culture is just that they prefer to sit at low tables and to sleep on the ground on duvets; it should be easy to see why they want less dirt on the ground than other cultures.
naishoya was fairly damning of all other methods of living, so naturally I'll be quite overt in my response. And almost everyone was a farmer until the last 100+ years. The only way to generate enough food, without machinery, was for all to take part in its creation.
People were more used to having hands in dirt. That doesn't mean unclean, but I do find all city dwellers more "fussy" about dirt. They take traditions made for pragmatism (keep dirt off the floor, eg tidiness), and evolve it to fussiness(eg, contaminated).
How much time have you spent in Japan? The bare foot never touches the genkan floor. It's alarming to do so.
Since you can't imagine it, you could consider looking up some videos of their use before mocking what you consider a fantastical impossibility. In fact it's so easy that children and the elderly succeed at it.
When I grew up a half of century ago in East Europe, keeping your shoes on when entering a house was still considered as an unacceptable behavior.
However, later this changed, in good part because much of the population moved from bigger rural houses to smaller apartments in the cities. In a small apartment, there was not enough space to have at the entrance a big enough wardrobe with dedicated places for the visitors to store their shoes, and to provide slippers for them. Moreover, a small apartment was easier to clean after the visitors left.
Thus the customs changed, and it became normal when visitors came and attempted to remove their shoes, according to tradition, to assure them that there is no need to do that. Nowadays I think that few remember that in the past it was really mandatory to never enter a house with your shoes on.
> tangential, but I don't understand why keeping your shoes on in your house is a thing.
I suspect it depends a lot on the climate, predominant style of housing etc. If you live in a nice climate and everyone has houses with backyards, you expect to be going in and out a lot all day. Very annoying to be constantly putting shoes on/off.
Personally, I just really don't care if the floor of my house is dirty. A thin smear of dog shit? If I can't smell it, I don't care. I'm not licking that floor. I'm not eating food off it. It's floor, it's basically in the same category as the ground outside: dirty.
I think of feet as dirty, so feet that go on the floor make the floor dirty.
Cleanliness is overrated. Sure, it's great for surgery and if you actually have a wound, but your immune system needs pathogens to train on, or it does silly things like attacking your body, or reacting to pollens.
I'm the same way but if I pass out in my house I absolutely do not give a shit about any of that and don't want the EMTs wasting time taking their shoes off to save my ass.
That is not the primary function of shoes. The function of shoes is to support your feet, protect them from harsh surfaces, keep them dry.
Unlike the commenter above you, I don’t really agree that it’s completely sanitary, though. I’m just saying that keeping you clean is actually pretty far down the list.
Another thing about whether the floor is sanitary: that changes a lot based on how you use your floor. If you eat, sleep, or sit on the floor often like in a traditional Japanese home, keeping the floor clean is a lot more important.
The "support your feet" argument came from the belief that everyone is supposed to have a prominent arch and that shoes could force your feet into that shape, but as far as I knew had been thoroughly refuted over the past 15-20 years. Forcing your feet into having an arch when it's not your natural form can actually cause problems further down the line. Soles not being flexible also changes how you use your ankle and IIRC how you balance while walking, possibly contributing to back problems.
Keeping your feet clean and protecting them from surfaces are the primary purposes of shoes. Some people need them for support after having worn shoes too often (my parents are in this situation and have a separate set of "indoor shoes" just for this), or some sort of disability that needs those super-wide-sole shoes, but in general they are not for supporting your feet.
Your feet do not need support, they were evolved over millions of years to support themselves. Someone who habitually wears shoes indoors might lose the muscle strength in their feet in the same way someone who drives everywhere loses leg strength, but this isn't natural or optimal.
Sorry, I phrased that poorly. The muscular support is its own thing (and I agree with you) but your soles don't deal well with hot summer asphalt surfaces, glass shards or even small pebbles surfaces.
I agree, but those bits of glass shards and pebbles end up wedged in shoes and released indoors. Shoes outdoors are important, but the exact stuff they are protecting you against is the stuff you don't want in your carpets.
Agreed. But you have to go shoeless throughout your youth so that the bones and muscles of the foot grow strong. This is true, for example, with kids in some African countries. There was a trend of barefoot running in the US in the 2010's (see Barefoot Sensei), but most people who tried this ended up quitting it as it's hard to shift to this style in, say, your 40's, after a lifetime of wearing shoes.
> But you have to go shoeless throughout your youth so that the bones and muscles of the foot grow strong.
Well, more directly, if you want to be going around barefoot outside, you have to go barefoot for a while in order to harden the skin on the bottom of your feet. It will happen naturally, given enough time, but walking around outdoors with soft feet will hurt like crazy. Bones and muscles are secondary.
In an American context, the primary reason to wear shoes is to prevent parasites on the ground from infecting you through your feet. Shoes are the single most important public health measure in American history, beating out handwashing.
People in shoes off houses tend to have slippers or house shoes, which never go outside. They also tend to have bathroom slippers, which are only ever used in the toilet areas.
It depends what you do outside. Historically shoes/boots/foot wraps were to protect your feet from the cold and from sharp things e.g. rocks, stones, spiky plants, spiders, snakes, ticks etc etc. Surely some of these conditions would still exist today even if outside was clean.
Having grown up in South Africa, moving to the states was the first time I ever heard of such a thing as a peanut allergy, or shrimp allergy, or gluten allergy, or any kind of allergy that wasn't having to wear a medic-alert bracelet to indicate an allergic reaction to penicillin.
Removing one's shoes before entering a house isn't a thing in South Africa.
I've lived in both shoes on and shoes off households and I'm sorry, but shoes are filthy. I wipe my dogs paws when they comes in from walks and their paws are filthy and I wipe them every single time they come back in from walks. Shoes are never wiped.
Take a second, get a tissue, and go wipe the bottom of your shoe.
Every country is different. I’m in China right now and while there isn’t much rubbish - it is still pretty dirty. Whereas in New Zealand you can walk barefoot all day and your feet will stay clean (matter of fact thats my kids do literally all the time).
Then sanitation itself is a but of a moot. Bacteria can spread million different ways, it’s mostly futile fight. If you wear flip-flops all day and don’t wash your feet, don’t shower after using public bathrooms, etc - whats the point?
And it's so much more comfortable to be in your house barefoot, with socks or with slippers.
So much cleaner. I'm disgusted when people try to walk in my house with their shoes on.