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Comment by samus | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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).

Getting one's hands dirty has little to do with cleanliness inside the home. Do you think the Japanese didn't have to do farmwork?

Contamination is not a modern concept either. Cue to how many religions have quite sharply defined criteria for ritual cleanliness.

Getting one's hands dirty has little to do with cleanliness inside the home. Do you think the Japanese didn't have to do farmwork?

Thank you for agreeing with precisely what I already said.

Contamination is not a modern concept either. Cue to how many religions have quite sharply defined criteria for ritual cleanliness.

I didn't say, elude, or mention that it was. Instead, I said 'city dwellers' are afraid of dirt.

> > Getting one's hands dirty has little to do with cleanliness inside the home. Do you think the Japanese didn't have to do farmwork?

> Thank you for agreeing with precisely what I already said.

Except that the discussion was never about that, but about cleanliness inside the house. You then went off a tangent with that BBC article.

> I didn't say, elude, or mention that it was. Instead, I said 'city dwellers' are afraid of dirt.

And the discussion was also never about people afraid of dirt. That's something you brought up to "muddy the water" and lead the discussion astray.

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