Today’s Washington Post carried an article called “Big in Japan? Fat chance for nation’s young women.” Among other points, we learn that young women in Japan are slimmer than they were two decades ago. Young men, however, have become heavier.
In the United States, more than one-third of the population is categorized as “obese” on the basis of BMI (Body Mass Index). In Japan, the obese population is four percent of the total.
Media messages about thinness abound. In addition, peer pressure is strong. Japanese women are outspokenly critical of each other’s looks, according to a researcher in the Keio University School of Medicine. Thinness among young women is reaching unhealthy levels. Eating disorders are becoming more frequent.
How to gain a deeper understanding of all this? I highly recommend a book called Beauty Up: Exploring Contemporary Japanese Body Aesthetics by cultural anthropologist Laura Miller.
One chapter takes you to an aesthetic salon where various procedures on the body promise to make you beautiful. Another explores breast mania. Even though young Japanese women want to be slender, they also desire larger-than-A-cup breasts and are willing to spend a lot of money on massage, pills and other ways to increase breast size.
Another chapter explores appetite and dieting of young women. Miller comments on the recent explosion of new products to help women achieve the desire for a thin body: weight-loss services, diet goods and diet fads like the Hot Pepper Diet or the Karaoke Diet in which the dieter sings and dances to her favorite hit song at least once a day. All this in response to what Miller sees as a surge in the desire for female thinness starting around 1980.
At the same time that young, modern women are rejecting a body shape associated with fertility and nurturance, they are also rejecting marriage and motherhood. The beauty industry claims to sell young women agency and power, along with thinness. But, as Miller says, “this process rests on a mythology of transformation created by domestic and transnational corporations” (p. 206).
Photo: “Different walk of life,” creative commons licensed content by Flickr user colodio.
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