Japanese Diet Looks West, With Fattening Results

Graduate student Satoshi Okada finds himself at fast-food joints too often these days, hunched over a calorie-packed meal of teriyaki burgers and fries.

The result? He’s one of a growing new breed in Japan: the overweight man.

“In short, I eat a lot,” said Okada, 22, who’s now in a weight-loss program at his university to shed some of the 191 pounds he has amassed on his 5-foot-8 frame.

Okada’s not the only one. Recent studies confirm what meets the eye: Japanese men, after centuries of staying trim on a lean cuisine of fish and seaweed, are getting flabby around the middle.

The shocker came in May, when the government announced that one in three Japanese men in their 30s is at least slightly overweight. Heft is also rising for men in their 20s and 40s.

The results were a jolt in Japan, where a scrumptious night out has traditionally meant slices of raw fish and vinegar-laced rice instead of filet mignon with potatoes and sour cream.

But times are changing, and so is the Japanese palate.

McDonald’s and local imitators dole out burgers and fries across the country. Increasingly popular convenience stores sell stacks of oily “lunch box” meals. Affluence means more beef--and more cholesterol.

The changes have hit men especially hard. Young women in Japan are actually getting thinner, from a rash of dieting and--some doctors say--an inactive lifestyle that has led to under-eating.

But men typically spend their days in rat-race jobs, wolfing down lunch and dinner on the run, then going out after hours with colleagues and clients to suck down another belly-busting favorite: beer.

Chubby children are a growing concern. Kids rushing from school to rigorous afternoon and evening cram courses have little time for proper meals and are increasingly turning to greasy food.

“Once I stopped doing exercise to study for entrance exams, I started gaining weight,” Kazuhiro Hatanaka, 19, said after taking a treadmill test in the same weight-loss program as Okada.

The changes, for the most part, are predictable for a country that has remade itself in just a few decades from a nation of hard-scrabble farmers to one of white-collar workers with sedentary jobs and hobbies.

Doctors are worried the trend will lead to higher incidence of the obesity-related sicknesses so prevalent in the West.

“If the Japanese continue this lifestyle, you’ll see a lot more people with diabetes,” said Dr. Fuminori Katsukawa of the Sports Medicine Research Center at Keio University in Yokohama, just south of Tokyo.

And while the traditionally salty Japanese diet has caused hypertension for centuries, high blood pressure cases these days are increasingly caused by clogged arteries, he said.

Health officials want to stave off the heart problems of other countries. In 1996, 138,044 Japanese died of heart disease, while in the United States, with just twice the population, 733,834 died from heart ailments.

For good or bad, signs of Japan’s weight gain are everywhere.

Big-bellied models pose coquettishly in a fashion magazine. Clothing stores for big people are opening. Overweight cops in the northern island of Hokkaido were recently issued orders to lose weight after a study found 25% of them were too fat.

Even the venerated sports haven for heavy boys--sumo--has come in for criticism. The head of the Sumo Assn. recently ordered wrestlers to slim down, blaming excess weight for an increase in injuries.

Sumo aside, the Japanese have far to go to match obesity in, say, the United States, where 55% of the population is overweight, according to new standards announced June 3 by the National Institutes of Health.

It’s not clear whether overweight Japanese face the same type of discrimination that big folks grapple with in the United States.

Sumo wrestlers, for example, lead glamorous lives and often marry models and actresses. A recent TV show depicted a sweaty, obese office worker as an endearing symbol of hard work and suffering rather than sloth. A young--and slim--office woman falls in love with him.

But in the harsh peer pressure world of children and teens, being the fat boy out can be costly.

Masanori Hayashi, 21, said he was so disgusted at 220 pounds that he went on a crash diet five years ago, shedding 66 pounds in two months and putting himself in the hospital.

Though he was vague about why he chose such a radical course, cruel comments by fellow students played a part.

“Other kids would rub my belly and tease me,” he said. “I just didn’t like being the fat one.”