“You can never be too rich or too thin”: so said Wallis Simpson. Or perhaps Dorothy Parker. Or perhaps Joan Rivers. No one really knows. But whoever said it, Japan appears to have had it engraved on its national escutcheon. Japan is officially the world’s thinnest rich country, with an obesity rate of just 4.3 percent of the population. By comparison, it’s 28 percent in the UK and 40 percent in the USA. A close comparison to Japan is Bangladesh, where the rate is 4.5 percent – but where one in ten people is dangerously undernourished. These are extraordinary statistics. What on earth is going on?
The most reached-for reason is diet. Japanese food, so it is thought, is healthy and lean. It combines two crucial factors: the food content itself (lots of rice, fish and vegetables), and small portion sizes. But this seems insufficient to explain low obesity. I live in Japan, and the Japanese love processed, convenience and frozen foods. Every convenience store has a display of tempting deep-fried chicken snacks right next to the till. McDonalds, KFC, Pizza Hut and Starbucks are ubiquitous. Portion sizes are often a little smaller, true, but obesogenic tidbits are everywhere, and very affordable. Japanese people have every opportunity to eat and drink as much as Americans or Britons do, but they don’t.
On to the next reason: exercise. Japanese cities, it is said, are very pedestrian-friendly. This doesn’t seem sufficient either. People do walk, but only a little more than they do in the UK. One of the largest international smartphone studies, published in Nature, analyzed 68 million days of step-count data from 717,000 people in 111 countries. It found average daily steps of approximately 6,000-6,500 for Japanese people versus 5,000-5,500 for British people (for a control, USA figures were 4,700). This difference of 1,000 steps a day between Japan and the UK represents a difference of 40-50 calories a day, or about half a banana. Admittedly, there are a lot of very spry elderly people exercising in parks.
The next most commonly cited reason is genetics. Japanese people, so the theory goes, remain thin throughout their lives through some metabolic lottery. But there is a neat counter-argument: the “Hawaii paradox”. Japanese Americans in Hawaii have obesity rates around three to four times higher than Japanese people living in Japan: roughly 15–20% versus about 4–5%, despite their shared ancestry.
Japan is the only place I have ever seen a realistic plastic replica of two kilos of body fat in a doctor’s office
So why does the richest convenience-store culture on earth have an obesity rate comparable to Bangladesh? Social norms exert an unusually powerful influence in Japan. These norms extend to dress, punctuality, speech, behavior on public transport and personal appearance. Being noticeably overweight can be perceived not simply as a health issue but as evidence of a lack of self-discipline. That creates a strong incentive to regulate eating and exercise. Japan is the only place I have ever seen a realistic plastic replica of two kilos of body fat in a doctor’s office. It was revolting.
This social stigma is actively underwritten by the state. Under Japan’s “Metabo Law”, employers, through their insurers, face financial penalties if their middle-aged workers fail to meet strict waistline targets. “Metabo” (from “metabolic”) is not the name of the law, which is more like “Specific Health Checkup Guidelines”: “metabo” is an insult.
Academic research has been done into Japan’s exceptionally high degree of social norm enforcement. The best-known framework is Michele Gelfand’s distinction between “tight” and “loose” cultures. In a landmark study of 33 countries, Japan ranked among the world’s “tightest” societies, those with strong social norms, low tolerance for deviant behavior and greater societal coordination. In Japan’s case, this tightness manifests itself partly as a disapproval of excess adipose tissue.
But if Japan is a tight culture, why is it so? Perhaps the most convincing reason is right under our feet here. Earthquakes take place every day: Japanese people are highly tuned to them and phone alarms go off regularly, scaring the living bejeezus out of everyone. Japan is also the most volcanically-active country in the world. It experiences typhoons and tsunamis (in 2011 the horrific Tohoku tsunami killed 20,000 people). This is the “ecological-threat theory” and is Gelfand’s own explanation. Strong norms evolve because coordinated societies survive external threats more successfully. For a thought experiment, try this: where in the world would you prefer to face a catastrophic breakdown of society: Japan, where everyone knows what to do and would make an orderly queue for food parcels, or the UK, where people would be looting supermarkets in the first week?
Eating small portions, walking more and consuming grilled fish are doubtless good things to do to lose weight. But in order to combat the obesity epidemic in the UK we might have to face an unpalatable truth: people in Japan are thin because they police one another, with all the negative consequences that flow from that in terms of eating disorders and mental health problems. And they habitually police one another because if they didn’t then society would fall apart after natural disasters (a.k.a. the ecological-threat theory of tightness).
In short, we should not be petitioning the government for more labels on food. We should be petitioning it for more volcanoes.
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