Kamenoko Tawashi

The Kamenoko Tawashi is a scrubbing brush with no handle. A bundle of stiff brown coconut fibres is clamped between two strands of twisted wire, like a bottle brush, and the resulting rod is bent double into a rounded oval that fits the palm, about ten centimetres long, with a small wire loop at the top for hanging. Held fibres downward it has, as its name says, something of the outline of a young turtle.

It was invented in Tokyo by Nishio Shōzaemon. His first product, a doormat of hemp-palm fibre wound on wire, failed: the bristles flattened underfoot, and the maker's account says much of the stock came back. Then he saw his wife Yasu bend one of the fibre rods to clean the latticed frames of the paper screens. In the hand, bent, it would not flatten. He worked the size and weight to suit her hand, named it after the turtles his son was watching, and in 1907 put it on sale. Before then the Japanese had scrubbed with bundles of straw or rope.

It did not sell at first; shopkeepers hung the brushes in strings of twenty under paper labels explaining what they were for. But it caught on, and by 1915 Nishio held a patent. Imitations followed, and the company wrapped its brushes in paper from 1919 so that customers could tell them apart. The family business moved to Takinogawa in 1923, and its head office and shop are there still. During the war, when coconut fibre could not be imported, the brushes were made of hemp palm.

The company now makes many tawashi, in palm, hemp palm and sisal, as well as sponges. Its No. 1, the original size, remains coconut fibre and galvanised wire, sold for scrubbing root vegetables, iron pans and colanders. It received a Good Design Long Life Design Award in 2013, and the company is now led by its fifth president, again a Nishio.