As a half-Japanese person (mom is Japanese), I'll never understand the Western reluctance to clean out your ears. I mean, Asians use ear picks like this all the time. In Japanese culture, it's pretty normal for husbands and wives to clean each others' ears like this, as do parents for their children.

In Japan, they are called mimikaki and they are used all the time. I keep them in my car, my desk at work, and all over the house to use when I get an itchy ear.

I've never, in my entire life (I'm 57 years old now) had an ear infection or other adverse effect from using them, and I've used them since I was a toddler.

Not cleaning the wax out of your ears seems so gross to me. It's like getting huge boogers in your nose, but refusing to blow your nose or a tissue when it's runny, because Western advice always seems to be "don't do that, it's normal to get boogers, so trust your body to get rid of them on its own." Gross.

Millions of Asians use mimikaki every day, and they aren't suffering from mass outbreaks of ear infections or pierced eardrums or whatever other strange ideas people have of just cleaning out your ear gunk once in a while...