In 1961, as the Soviet Union sent the first humans into space, women in Japan were celebrating a breakthrough of their own.
That year, a Tokyo-based company called Anne — pronounced “_an-neh_” and named after Anne Frank, the German-born Holocaust victim — introduced the country’s first mass-produced disposable menstrual pads.
A newspaper advertisement announced the product’s arrival with a strikingly simple message: “Thank you for waiting 40 years!”