Sunday, November 12, 2006

Some other thoughts on Japan

Another post about Japan and certainly not the last. Not while my fascination with the country continues like this. However, this one is a bit different because I'm posting some other person's words on Japan. He summarizes my exact thoughts brilliantly so thought would pay him tribute.

He is Giles Coren, a columnist at The Times and the below excerpt is taken from his 28th October 2006 article, in which the main subject is obesity. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,10653-2425205,00.html


"And another thing: I spent the first four days of this week in Tokyo, and if pollution makes you fat then why, in a city so polluted that a good proportion of the workforce feels compelled to walk the streets in face masks, did I not see a single person even as chubby as me? I went, in a bound, from being the thinnest man in London to the fattest man in Tokyo.
Indeed, after a couple of days among these beautifully dressed, impeccably polite and helpful, slim and well-groomed people, I had almost forgotten what a race of fat, feckless scruffs my own compatriots have become — until I caught sight, on the third morning, of a vast-arsed European male in shorts and trainers galumphing wheezily up the street towards me, looking for all the world like a giant toddler.
In Japan, only schoolchildren wear short trousers. Once past 10 they dress, as we used to in Britain, like adults, in well-fitting, modest clothes and lace-up shoes. Why did the flabby tourist not have the decency to identify the cultural inaptness of his appearance and modify it with more suitable clothing, or stay at home?
An even heftier reminder of the crisis in Britain came at Tokyo airport when I was checking in, where three Englishmen of 18 stone each or more stood in front of me, their feet wide apart in that stability-maintaining stance to which the morbidly obese resort, wearing the first tracksuits I had seen since I arrived (for I had attended no athletics meetings) and clutching vast Starbucks tubs of warm frothy milk drinks, just like mother used to express. This tubby triumvirate looked not like toddlers, but bona fide babies."


By the way, I myself unfortunately committed the above crime of going around in shorts in Japan, albeit a bit more gracefully than the said-European male, I'd think.

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