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Though Why Japanese Women Don’t Get Old or Fat didn’t have the same popularity as its French predecessor (and, in fact, doesn’t even show up on a search of ‘why japanese women don’t get fat’ – you’ve got to have the ‘old’ in there first), Japanese women are obviously doing something right. In addition to having one of the lowest obesity rates in the world and the second highest number of McDonald’s, after the US, by the end of September there will be over 30,000 women age 100+ in Japan.
I’m not sure I’ve ever even met somebody over 100, let alone am I able to conceive of 30,000 of them in the same country.
The Japanese can probably thank a few things for bumping so many people to triple digits – traditional diet, a culture of moderate exercise (read: walking a lot), obviously, but also a culture of preventative medicine combined with a National Health Care plan and, depending on the prefecture, some pretty decent, publicly funded senior citizen care.
Though I never saw a doctor while living in Kajigaya, outside Tokyo, I heard anecdotes from foreigners and natives alike. There weren’t any complaints about the burden of the National Health Care system tax-wise, and with obesity rates as low as they are in Japan, it’s probably because it just doesn’t cost as much as it would here in the States. There were, however, some issues with how busy it often was – at doctor’s offices, hospitals, etc – with people going in for every little thing. In some ways that’s actually good, because it means people were going in when a problem started (or when they thought a problem started), getting things checked out while they were still easy (and cheap) to treat. In other ways that’s bad – as my friend in Tokyo, who would really just like to see a therapist but can’t find one with a single open appointment – can attest.
And though it varies by prefecture, as this is a more locally-funded endevour, hats off to Japan for keeping an eye on its elderly population rather than leaving it wholly in the hands of family (who may not have the funds, or may not exist). My dorm manager told me that the local government sent rice cookers and water heaters to every household with someone over a certain age (let’s say 60, for our purposes). Because Japanese people are sort of expected to a) eat rice every day, and b) drink tea every day, those little machines were rigged to alert the local government office if they hadn’t been used in the past 3 days. The office would then dispatch an ambulance to the house, just in case. Gone are the days of old ladies being found half-eaten by their yappy dog pack weeks after dying in their homes.
But I do hope there’s some kind of handy vacation setting on those rice cookers and electric kettles. It would get a bit pricey to send emergency vehicles out every time old folks went out of town.
In this day and age, with “organic” being the specialty item and the regular old pesticide-treated foods being the norm, I have to wonder just how much pesticide has to be on/in/otherwise around something for it to be considered tainted. Probably not the question I was supposed to be asking when the Yomiuri reported on tainted rice produced in China distributed to 119 facilities in Japan, but there we have it. Though the Yomiuri focuses on the role of shipper and sales firm Misaka Foods, the fact that the rice came from China doesn’t really help in conjunction with the baby formula recall in China after about 50 cases of kidney stones and one death as the result of babies drinking tainted formula. The culprit, an excess of melamine in the mix, is reminiscent of the pet food recall last year, and is one in a long line of tainted/dangerous/otherwise bad news products from China.
There isn’t exactly a plus side to infant and pet deaths or products being consumed without warning from a shipping company that might have known they were tainted, but there’s something like a less-depressing side. Because there’s really no way to sweep dead children under the rug (at least not those killed by corporations – female infanticide by families remains, as usual, a different story) China’s Health Ministry has been doing damage control. We can probably expect the hammer to come down on formula producer Sanlu Group Co. as a result, and some stricter (if not necessarily strict) regulations on industries across the board.
Now were is the (ideally death-free) labor scandal to force fair pay and working conditions in China? Though that would jack up the price of our precious disposable fashion. I’m not sure there are enough unregulated third-world countries to fill the gap if China ever got on board with labor laws.
If the fact that Japan has gone through two Prime Ministers in the last two years is any indication, it’s not the easiest job. The domination of the conservative Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) since the 50’s and general public disinterest make politics, from this layperson’s standpoint, an even more bureaucratic and thankless job than usual. So even if I’m not a big fan of the LDP (particularly Shinzo Abe, but let’s focus), I’ve got to give props to Yuriko Koike, who’s just thrown her had in the ring for the newly open PM position. If she won, she wouldn’t just be the first woman to hold the position – she’d be the first to try.
As best put by Koike herself, “Hillary used the word ‘glass ceiling’ … but in Japan, it isn’t glass, it’s an iron plate.”
Now I love Japan. I’ve studied the language, I’ve lived in the country, I want to go back. But part of loving a place is taking the good with the bad, and Japan’s big ‘bad’ is the pervasive sexism. It is, from an outsider’s perspective, partly cultural – in English some people might split hairs about ‘woman’ just being ‘man’ with a prefix, but in Japanese ‘husband’ uses the symbol for ‘master’ and ‘wife’ the symbol for ’servant’. If that kind of thing is in your own language, in how you have to communicate with people, it’s a little hard to escape. The other part is that there’s a sort of unspoken acceptance of the way things are. If no one does anything, nothing’s going to happen.
That’s why someone like Koike could make a difference – by her quotes, albeit translated, she seems like one BAMF. And as Dodai on Jezebel discussed this morning, the more women are in charge the less people hate the idea of women in charge. It’s not going to be an easy job for Koike, but I hope it’s one she gets a shot at. Even if her office time isn’t much better than her predecessors, she’ll still have set up the Jaws of Life on that iron plate.
Japan’s new PM will be chosen on September 22.
In honor of my friends from Japan, who just left this morning: Guys, your polar bears are green.
I feel like they don’t have algae problems in the arctic. But whatevs, I’m sure the bears don’t mind, nor will they be haunted by the punniness of ‘It’s not easy being green’ as I will.
We visited the Jim Henson exhibit while my friends were here. I couldn’t not say it.
