If the package seems a little banal, it is because it goes back almost a century: this soap was launched in 1928, at a time the Japanese probably thought of milk as something rather exotic. The cow wasn't chosen only because the soap contains milk but also because the company (it's from Osaka and called Gyunyu Sekken Kyoshinsha) feels it expresses its philosophy: there is in Japanese the expression that something is "progressing like a cow" (ushi no ayumi no gotoku/牛の歩みのごとく) i.e. slowly but steadily and always forward. Almost a hundred years later it looks like it worked out for them.
(For a bigger version of this picture both in color and black and white, check my "Japan Arekore" set on Flickr).
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