The first cotton swab appeared in Japan was with a white birch wood stem which was too soft to be used as building material, which is because toothpick production was flourishing as one of the woodworks thanks to a plenty of white birch available in Takayama at that time.
In 1946, founding a general partnership company ‘Takayama Mokuzai Kogyosho’, Mr. Akio Kurokawa who was the first president of the company producing wooden box for iron, focused on cotton swabs starting to appear in the market, and began to study how to produce cotton swab since it used same white birch for its stem and was made in the same process as toothpick.
The practical use of the technology that sharpens the tip of stem while rolling it as well as the idea of the method winding up cotton fibers after loosening cotton helped to develop our original cotton swab producing machine, and generated the first cotton swab in Japan. In 1965, Mr. Kurokawa established the former HEIWA EIZAI CO.,LTD. which is the current HEIWA MEDIC CO., LTD, as hygiene product manufacturer to start manufacturing and selling cotton swabs first in Japan.
Comparing with foreign cotton swab which was simply wound with a cotton ball, it was a Japanese unique process that winds loosened cotton to a tip of stem as cotton candy, which is essentially as same as that of today.

However, such domestically produced cotton swabs had low demand in Japan when it started its operation. Most swabs were exported to Europe and Australia, but rapidly spread into a lot of families in Japan after 1970’s. Then we have produced a variety kind of cotton swabs for various usages up to the present including mass producible and low cost plastic cotton swab, high-safety paper cotton swab, thin type swab convenient for baby, earpick shaped cotton swab, and our originally developed black cotton swab which user easily can see earwax with, etc.