Will Miss #426 - perspective on thinness

I'm going to let you in on two secrets. First, this is a personal blog. The presentation may obscure that fact, but it is about me, my experiences, and my feelings as much as it is about Japan. Second, I have had an eating disorder for most of my life. Part of that disorder is the distorted notion that having the right body (i.e., a thin one) will cure all of life's problems. If you are thin enough, you will be beautiful, loved, healthy, and have success. In my home culture, in which many people are overweight, this message is served up early and often. Living in Japan has helped correct this distorted thinking. Almost everyone is thin, but many people are ugly, lonely, sick, and unsuccessful. Yes, even thin people get Type 2 diabetes, cancer, heart disease, arthritis, etc. I see it often here. There isn't an expansive and incessant cultural message here that thinness is a panacea for your woes (or that fatness is the root of all of them), and personal experience with people who are thin yet still have problems has been a powerful experience for a person with my history.

I'll miss living in a culture which doesn't view attaining a particular body image as the end-all and be-all of answers to life's problems and being around people who have problems despite being thin.

Will Miss #241 - attitude toward (same gender) nudity

One of my students had foreign guests visit her family and they went to an onsen. The foreign couple refused to take part with her family when visiting the hot springs even though it was all women in one pool and all men in a completely separate one. My student couldn't understand their squeamishness, and asked me why they wouldn't join them. I told her that we have a lot of shame in connection to the naked body and its imperfections, even when revealing it to people of the same gender. The Japanese don't seem to hold bodies to the same impossible standards that Americans do, and have a more relaxed and balanced notion of what a body should look like.

I will miss the lack of shame most Japanese people feel about the human body and their lack of self-consciousness about revealing their (quite natural and usual) imperfections to perfect strangers of the same gender.