I think people's image of Japanese cuisine is generally very healthy. Little slivers of fish accompanied by a tiny bowl of fluffy white rice and maybe some kind of perfectly placed leaf. That kind of thing. A lot of foreigners here have a hard time convincing their parents that they don't just eat sushi every day. But to be honest, I'm not sure Japanese cuisine is as healthy as its reputation suggests. Some elements are healthy, sure: a lot of seafood, tofu, soybeans, and the portions are generally small (except with ramen for some reason, which generally comes in massive bowls which I literally never finish). However, there's also a lot of convenience food, which a lot of busy workers and students seem to rely on almost entirely: convenience store fried chicken, canned coffee full of sugar, cup noodles, sweet pastries. There are tonnes of small restaurants on every corner that cater cheaply to hordes of tired people. Even in traditional cuisine, there's a fair amount of fried food (Nagoya's specialty is crispy chicken wings), fatty cuts of meat, and sticky glutinous rice. (At this point the entire world screams at me either for suggesting carbs are bad and I'm missing out the real culprit of fat, or for suggesting fats are bad and I'm missing out the real culprit of carbs. All of these people yelling I presume have photocopies of their PhDs in nutrition ready to send to me.)
I feel like I meet a lot more people here than back home who simply don't know how to cook. Back home I think cooking is considered an important life skill for every adult, even if many people can only knock up the same few basic recipes. On the other hand, I feel like in Japan lots of people within certain demographics never feel much pressure to learn how to cook and can just rely on families, noodle bars and 7-11 to meet all their nutritional needs. Young people often live with their parents throughout university and beyond, and still have their meals cooked by their mothers. Office workers often have cafeterias and the aforementioned junk-food infrastructure to fall back on, since they don't have much time to cook and many live in small company-provided apartments that may not even have proper kitchens. And men often move from eating their mother's meals to their wife's meals, with any time in between probably not being worth the effort to learn.
For English teachers, too, it can be hard to convince yourself to cook unless you get into good habits. It's easy to get 'skinny-fat' in the eikaiwa lifestyle - not eating until late and living off snacks while working, running around after kids and then slurping up a bowl of ramen with the rest of the miserable worker bees, not gaining weight but not feeling very healthy either. I'm pretty familiar with 'skinny-fat' - the genetic lottery has awarded me a petite frame and I don't gain weight easily, which is easy to confuse with good health until you realise you need a water break and a nap after crambling up a set of stairs. ("Crambling" is a word I invented. I'm going for a portmanteau of scrambling and crumbling.) I'm trying to take better care of my health, Saizeriya aside, as well as trying to consume a lot less meat for various reasons.
But it can be harder in Japan than at home:
- My working times are awkward, which means I eat dinner late, and I don't have a proper lunchbreak at work where I can get a proper meal out. I really should be better packing lunches for myself rather than allowing myself to get hungry and buying sugary energy bars on my breaks.
- A lot of ingredients I might buy to cook healthy meals at home (pulses, cheeses, some vegetables) aren't available here, or are only available from expensive import stores which aren't close to my house. A lot of healthy/vegetarian/vegan recipes I see knocking around often rely on fancy stuff that hasn't made it to Japan yet. Quinoa, agave nectar, decaffeinated boobly flour and so on.
- I don't have a proper oven or much cooking equipment/space.
- The meat thing is also hard when you go out, as despite the aforementioned image of peaceful Buddhist simplicity many people get when they picture Japanese cuisine, vegetarianism is still very fringe in Japan and even vegetable-based dishes will generally use meat stock or just go the whole hog (ahem) and stick big chunks of meat in there without telling anyone. I recently saw an online article about eating vegan in Japan, which basically ended up telling people in desperately hopeful terms that you can do it perfectly easily so long as you just stick to eating bits of cabbage leaves and lotus roots that arrive as the side dish to everyone else's meal.
Nonetheless, I'm trying. I've realised the key is good meal planning, so I'm trying to work out my meals every weekend. I might take to doing all my meal prep in advance on one day a week and store lots of pre-prepared meals in Tupperware in the fridge, though I'm a bit worried it'll turn me into one of these wide-eyed nutrition-obsessed ladies in a tank top who eats the same slice of salmon with cucumber every day but always uploads it to Instagram anyway. I'm still basically eating what I want, but I just try to make sure I have things in the house I can actually prepare quickly and eat, or else I tend to get lazy, wait until I'm way too hungry to cook and just get something from Lawson instead. In terms of exercise, I'm enjoying doing pilates at home most days, though the mat I do it on seems to pick up loads of hair and dust which then get all over me, creating a kind of mini-Yeti effect. I'm not sure it's the most intense or effective exercise but I enjoy the way it feels and I already feel like I'm getting a bit more toned and defined.
Hopefully I can update you all on my progress soon! I might even stick up some recipes. And eventually, I'd like to put up a picture of me lifting up a big truck with my muscles. Might have to keep training for a few more weeks though.
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