Just returned from a trip to Japan and found the absence of obesity very noticeable, almost jarring. No market for Ozempic there. The way this is accomplished is interesting.
In 2008, the Japanese government noticed that obesity was slightly rising. So they introduced the “Metabo Law,” which was designed to reduce the negative consequences of a large waistline. The law contained a simple rule. Once a year, every workplace and local government in Japan has to bring in a team of nurses and doctors to measure the waistline of adults between ages 40 and 74. If the measurements are above a certain level, the person is referred to counseling, and workplaces draw up health plans with employees to lose weight. Companies with fattening work forces can face fines. https://time.com/6974579/japan-food-culture-low-obesity/
The author of the Time article noted the cultural uniqueness of the Japanese.
“I told all the Japanese people I talked to that if you tried this in the U.S. or Britain, people would be outraged and burn down their offices. They invariably looked puzzled, and asked me why. I said that people would feel like it was not their employer’s business what they weighed, and that it was a monstrous intrusion of their privacy. Most of them nodded politely, said nothing, and looked at me like I was slightly crazy. Nagira said simply: “Being fat is not good.””
It is like the requirement to wear a mask during a pandemic of a disease spread by aerosols. The Japanese see this as a common sense policy for the public good. We see it as an affront to personal freedoms that apparently extends to the right to spread disease and increase health care costs through overeating.
The boundary areas where individuals encounter immediate, local, and larger communities including “nation” and “humanity” and “ is one of the crux problems of our time.
The Japanese emphasis on conforming communities is potent and dangerous. The USAian emphasis on tough independent individuals is potent and dangerous.
The insane and ongoing acceleration of social change means all humans and communal groups are zones of ever more confusion and potential for both good and ill.
On Public Health I am very Japanese, and on education I am Finnish. On innovation I am not only USAian, but Silicon Valley.
On Public Health I am very Japanese, and on education I am Finnish. On innovation I am not only USAian, but Silicon Valley.
How about all of you?
d fb
I am not “very” Japanese on social issues but I really don’t understand the manic cult of the individual we have in this country. (Even tho it seems to co-exists with groupism. Think current politics. Don’t try to be too individual) It has to start at the bottom not at the top. We can all root for the Yankees but the Gov and do-gooder groups who think they know better (latest studies show) have no right and ought to have no right to force us under penalty to root for The Yankees or even like Baseball.
Modern Japanese society seems pretty distant from anything that is potent and dangerous. There may have been a time when the value of the Japanese individual was secondary to the needs of the state, but that has either changed or the needs of the state have become so liberalized it no longer matters. Modern Japanese art and music is remarkably eclectic. Japanese teens dress flamboyantly and without any seeming regard to gender stereotypes. Pornography and violence in film and magazines are much more tolerated.
When I ask my Japanese colleagues why Japanese behave the way they do the answer I get is rarely some overriding cultural or philosophical imperative. Rather the reasons are almost always personal. It is either for one’s best interest (“being fat is bad”) or to avoid being rude. The latter is the reason why no one talks on the phone in the subway and one wears a mask if one has a cough. There is no law requiring these things. It is just considered being polite.
There are very few public trash cans in Japan. That’s because everyone holds themselves accountable for the trash they produce, i.e., you carry it with you and dispose of it at home. No one seems to be enforcing these things. Littering just isn’t done.
Rather than being a repressive society my impression is that the Japanese are more ethically advanced than most other cultures.
That deeply ingrained American culture that celebrates racism, ignorance and innumeracy as “Freedom” is very easy for our adversaries to exploit. It will eventually kill us all.
The very successful Russian disinformation campaign in 2020 cost them less than $2 million worth of ads on Facebook. The Russian intelligence agency (the SVU) upped the ad budget to $10 million for 2024, and the US Attorney General is holding press conferences about it.
Where’s the press conference on the billions of dollars spent by the oil & gas industry to portray climate change as “a hoax”? Or the health care industry’s effort to convince people that introducing competitive markets and transparent pricing in Health Care is actually Socialism or Communism?
I would not say the US is about “tough, independent, individuals”. The US is, again, increasingly, about enforced conformity, just a different enforced conformity than you see in Japan. We are told we need to tolerate, if not support, people parading around with assault rifles. We, increasingly, are seeing a return to government enforced religion. I hold that the US reached peak independent thought in the 70s, and has been going retrograde ever since.
The way it used to be…
America: Everything is permitted if not forbidden
Germany: Everything is forbidden if not permitted
Italy: Everything is permitted specially if forbidden
Russia: Everything is forbidden specially if permitted
I would argue that it is about different levels of maturity. The Japanese would not parade around with assault rifles even if it were legal because doing so would upset some people for no reason, and that would be rude and impolite. Americans want to show off their assault rifles in order to upset people and attract attention.
The Japanese behave like adults. Americans behave like 4th grade boys.
It is not just Americans. In the World Cup matches, Japanese fans are known for cleaning up after the match regardless of whether Team Japan wins or loses. In contrast, the Brits and Irish fans are notorious for getting drunk and fighting. Again, the Japanese behave as adults and the Brits/Irish like 4th grade boys.
Some cultures are simply more ethically mature than others.
Yep. Prior to 1980, the most successful Washington “think tanks” produced high quality, peer-reviewed research and then tried to sell the idea to whichever Party was more open to it.
Two Congressional staffers thought this approach was unnesscessarily cumbersome. It didn’t need to be high quality or peer-reviewed. It was just as easy to sell straight up propoganda, and the Heritage Foundation was born.
Historian Rick Pearlstein has written several books on the subject.
Agreed, up to a point. And in describing the Japanese communal fixation as potent and dangerous I am not referring to their danger to us, but rather how they themselves frequently see their cultural inheritance — as something to be understood and then partially overcome.
Similar to my attitude about USAian individualism….
Humans are very good at domesticating pliable animals like cats, dogs, horses, and humans. The process is called variously culture, education, or religion.
From The Computer and the Brain by John von Neumann, 1958.
It is only proper to realize that language is largely a historical accident. The basic human languages are traditionally transmitted to us in various forms, but their very multiplicity proves that there is nothing absolute and necessary about them. …it is only reasonable to assume that logics and mathematics are similarly historical, accidental forms of expression
These days von Neumann might have written, “Language is an emerging property of Complex Systems. It arose in diverse forms in various geographies.” Same with number systems, base 2, base 8, base 10, base 12, base 16, base 20…
You are doubling down without giving any specifics. Japanese culture is not perfect. There is an ethnocentrism common to many cultures that creates the belief that we (name your group) are the chosen people. But I don’t think that applies to anything I’ve stated. I found the Japanese were polite to everyone, even obnoxious tourists. They may not like you, but they still respect you enough to treat you with consideration.
The central tenet of Christianity is to “do unto others as you would have them do to you”. Ironically I think it is the Shintoist/Buddhist Japanese who most exemplify that philosophy.
There is something to be said about a culture that isn’t anywhere near a police state but where hordes of 5 year old kids ride the subways alone, the streets are clean, one gets great service without the need to tip, tourists don’t need money belts to protect from pickpockets, and there is no “dangerous part of the city”.
America is capital allocation. You can go pound sand.
Japan is almost entirely one population. We are not. Do you strip the Italians of their culture to make them conform to American society? Of course not.
This morning entering Starbucks, the mall is getting a facelift. I am listening to the radio in the car, “There needs to be budget cuts”. That was part of a very loose recap of news events.
The state of Connecticut with Federal money has construction projects everywhere. Those budget cuts were pandemic monies.
The poor in CT are pounding sand. That said mimimum wage is much higher in relative terms post pandemic.
The rich make all the decisions in America. You want to be fat on whatever, pasta, potatos, grits, whatever…that is up to you. The money is not tied to how fat you are. Some individualism, sarcasm.
