Westerners overwhelmingly believe that Japanese people are long-lived paragons of health who sustain their slim figures on a diet of rice, miso, fish, and karate. Contrary to popular belief, however, most men and women here in Tokyo tend to eat like shit and do fuck-all for exercise.

Thanks to globalization and modernization, the contemporary Japanese adult subsists on foodstuffs of convenience similar to that of their porky first world contemporaries. McDonalds and Starbucks are on every corner and business is booming. The prepared food sections of most supermarkets reek of vegetable oil wafting out of display cases full of deep-fried tempura and katsu. Your average single person probably eats instant ramen at least once a week. In short, Japan is not immune to the allure of cheap and easy eats.

One would expect that with the modernization of the Japanese diet and culture comes a modernization (read: fattening) of the Japanese figure, but in a twist that makes me absolutely tickled to be a wage-slave in this concrete jungle, Japanese women are actually becoming thinner!

Check out this chart of obesity statistics for Japanese men and women from Japan’s Ministry of Health, Labour, and Welfare:

While Japanese men continue to fatten across the board, Japanese women under the age of 60 are skinny, even by their own stricter standard (a BMI of 25 to 18.5 is normal, 18.5 and below is skinny) and trending skinnier. Imagine a girl standing 5’2″ (157 cm) weighing in at 135 lbs (61 kg) or less. As of 2007, more than a 95% of Japanese women in their 20’s are of these proportions, with roughly a quarter of them weighing in at less than 100 lbs (45kg) for the same height. Apply US obesity standards to Japan and that 95% will likely become 99%. If you’re anything like me and you refuse to romantically associate with rotund women (now ~35% of the adult population in the US), this is pretty awesome. To give you an idea of how exceedingly rare obese women are in Tokyo, it is more common to see people with severe mental and/or physical handicaps walking around this megalopolis than female sumo wrestlers.

What aspects of Japan keeps the women thin despite a pervasive fast food culture? Could it be because Japanese food, in general, comes in much smaller portions? A Japanese-sized large beverage is often on par with an American medium. Could it be because Japanese neighborhoods are designed to be walkable? It’s not uncommon for your average Japanese office lady to be on her feet for an hour while she navigates the labyrinthian Tokyo public transit system on her way to and from work.

These factors, while helpful in keeping the rolls in the bread basket and off your belly, are not what is maintaining these svelte Japanese women. Remember, Japanese dudes’ waistlines are expanding while their women keep getting skinnier. Abs are made in the kitchen; the key difference lies in eating habits. Men routinely chow down with little regard to their figure, as can be seen at the local gyudon restaurants packed with pot-bellied salary men stuffing their faces full of rice and sugar-shoyu meat on their lunch breaks. At the same time, women can be seen at their desks savoring a cup of instant soup and not much else.

Male preference doesn’t seem to factor much into female fat suppression, either. This should not be all that surprising. Men, especially lazy-ass, gameless herbivore men, will take whatever is available to them. Just look at America, where the wild buffa-ho’s roam. The demand for slim women has not disappeared in the slightest, as one can see from their domination of most popular media and advertising. An utterly average Japanese girl can move to America and have her pick of the male litter just for being petite. Still, there is no great urgency for American women work on their physiques because don’t let anyone hold you to an unrealistic standard of beauty, everyone is special and perfect just the way they are, big is beautiful…you get the idea. So what’s different in Japan?

This excerpt of an article from the Washington Post nicely summarizes why Japans No-Fat-Chicks policy is in full effect:

Social pressure — women looking critically at other women — is the most important reason female skinniness is ascendant in Japan, according to Hisako Watanabe, a child psychiatrist and assistant professor of pediatrics at the Keio University School of Medicine in Tokyo. “Japanese women are outstandingly tense and critical of each other,” said Watanabe, who has spent 34 years treating women with eating disorders. “There is a pervasive habit among women to monitor each other with a serious sharp eye to see what kind of slimness they have.”

Japanese women, not men, are putting the pressure on each other to stay slim through passive fat shaming. Passive because, as a rule, Japanese folks avoid direct confrontation as much as possible. They do not deride the porcine, but praise the thin. On the social media front, one can see women writing “You look so skinny!” as a form of high praise, not a voicing of concern over the subject’s lack of nutrition. In the office, someone losing weight one some new diet is big, big news. Average Yumiko Tanaka showing up to her lunch table with a Whopper while her peers dine on salad is likely to feel out of place. If one of Yumiko’s slimmer coworkers comments on how she’s started a diet because she’s been getting pudgy, Yumiko will feel double pressure. Yumiko knows that letting herself go could ostracize herself from the group.

This passive fat shaming is the key that could unlock the beauty of the west from their flabby confines. While the Japanese obsession with being thin over being fit produces a lot of thinspo/skinny-fat bodies, it’s a far cry better than what Western society has been churning out. Unfortunately, adopting passive fat shaming would require women to both selectively praise the thin and feel bad about their life choices in countries which encourage neither.

Luckily for me — and you, should you decide to someday visit the land of the rising sun — I doubt fat acceptance will ever gain any purchase here. An appreciation of aesthetic beauty is a deeply ingrained part of Japanese culture. People in general, and young women in particular, go through much greater effort to make themselves presentable than possibly any where else on the planet. Instead of admonishing someone for passing over a good book because of its terrible cover, a Japanese person would more likely think, “Why would someone make a good book so ugly?”