Nap Cap Pricing and Indigenous Indonesian Clog Wearing Customs

In an ongoing email thread, my Dad and I have been pondering an interesting question he raised: since Indonesia was colonized by the Dutch, did the native population ever take to wearing clogs?

He writes:

Newl-

Did you notice that the NC [Ed — he’s referring, of course, to the previously-mentioned Nap Cap] is $99.95! Your brain would already need to be asleep to order one!

By the way, I’ve been reading the history of foreign occupation in Indonesia, and it seems very unlikely that anyone other than aristocrats who profited from the Dutch presence ever chose to wear wooden shoes…

Anyone out there got an answer for him? My googling reveals nada.

I’m lookin’ at you, Frans V

UPDATE
: My buddy Frans V., who in fact grew up in Singapore and is of Dutch heritage, writes:

Newley,
The Dutch never wore wooden shoes. In fact, it was a dutchman named Johanas van der Vooran van Wuden who came up with the idea after the decline of the Moluccan spice trade to invent the wooden shoe and market them for tourists. The dutch had hoped that tourists would buy their famously large wheels of cheese, but they kept rolling off the sides of the ships as tourists returned home. The wooden shoe however proved quite popular and before long you could see tourists clogging clumsily down the cobble stone streets. Pickpockets soon picked up on this correlation of cash carrying tourist and poor mobility and the great Clog Crime wave took place in Amsterdam in 1872. Soon after the wooden shoe fell out of favor and the dutch tourism board lobbied to have Holland’s nuclear power plants replaced with windmills. So in fact, the dutch never really wore wooden shoes and people in Indonesia during colonial times for that matter wore Tevas, which have since been replaced by the locally produced Nike Aquasock.

Who knew?

2 replies on “Nap Cap Pricing and Indigenous Indonesian Clog Wearing Customs”

This posting inspired me to do my own search. I have yet to find the answer but this is an issue close to my heart after having lived in the Netherlands for a year and being overexposed to ‘KLOMPEN’ (the correct Dutch word for clog if I recall correctly but it is possible that I don’t recall correctly). I even was treated to a tour of the Klompen factory in the province of South Brabant. I saw quite a few elderly bikers rolling through the countryside pedalling away in real clogs (it wasn’t through a haze of skunky smoke either). The younger generation seemed inspired to use these wonderful clogs as a sort of flower pot. More research required……

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