I have been looking through some old English-language newspapers in Japan from 1915 (more on this later). I found an interesting advertisement/article on page three of the April 7th issue of The Japan Gazette. Despite the proximity to April 1st (both now and in that daily newspaper), considering some of the strange advertisements I saw in other issues, I can’t tell if it is a joke. I don’t think it can be protected by copyright anymore so I reproduce the whole article here:
How Thin People Can Put On Flesh
A New Discovery Thin men and women – that big, hearty, filling dinner you ate last night. What became of all the fat-producing nourishment it contained? You haven’t gained in weight one ounce. That food passed from your body like unburned coal through an open grate. The material was there, but your food doesn’t work and stick, and the plain truth is you hardly get enough nourishment from your meals to pay for the cost of cooking. This is true of thin folks the world over. Your nutritive organs, your functions of assimilation, are sadly out of gear and need reconstruction.
Cut out the foolish foods and funny sawdust diets. Omit the flesh cream rub-ons. Cut out everything but the meals you are eating now and eat with every one of those a single Sargol tablet. In two weeks note the difference. Five to eight good solid pounds of healthy, “stay there” fat should be the net result. Sargol charges your weak, stagnant blood with millions of fresh new red blood corpuscles – gives the blood the carrying power to deliver every ounce of fat-making material in your food to every part of your body. Sargol, too, mixes with your food and prepares it for the blood in easily assimilated form. Thin people gain all the way from 10 to 25 pounds a month while taking Sargol, and the new flesh put on stays. Sargol tablets are a scientific combination of six of the best flesh-producing elements known to chemistry. They come 40 tablets to a package, are pleasant, harmless and inexpensive, and North & Rae, Ltd., and other druggists in Yokohama sell them.
What the?!!! This is just so…. bizarre. Was the ideal body figure in Japan at this time like the Renaissance era plumpiness? Also Mitch, will you be putting the original Japanese up on your sight somewhere? It would be interesting, and I’d like to show it to Ryoko.
You could write about these adverts on my blog. I’ve got lots of funny 17th-century ones. My friend tells me that plump women were prized in old time China. Do you know anything about that?
Hey Derek, this was published in The Japan Gazette which was an English-language newspaper in Japan. No original Japanese that I know of. I suspect it is a British or American product marketed for foreigners in Japan. Google doesn’t turn up anything though.
Duckling, I don’t know much about how plumpness was viewed, except having been told that plump women were valued in Europe’s history more than they are by our contemporaries. I am almost sure there must be studies out there on this. This is 20th century, but I’ll post a little something on your 17th cent. page…
Sorry, I just stumbled across this old blog entry while looking for information on Sargol. No, I was not looking to put on pounds and pounds of healthy stay-there fat. Actually, I found this same advertisement in a newspaper in the Vancouver Sun from 1915 and I was curious to see if the suppliment still existed.
So evidently, it was not targeted to a Japanese market specifically. I guess the Victorian ideal of beauty as “pleasingly plump” was still going strong in the second decade of the 20th century. Depending on the readership of the Japan Gazette (was it British expatriots? or English-speaking Japanese?), the appearance of this advertisement there might indicate, in the first case, a process of standardisation of culture in English communities scattered abroad, or in the second case, an assumption that English ideals of beauty should be universal.
As far as studies on the subject go, I’m sure you’re right that they exist. The only one I can think of offhand is Naomi Woolfe’s The Beauty Myth. It is a good book, but polemical and more political than academic.
please let me know if Sargol tablet is available in Delhi (INDIA)