Annual Health Check, 2009

One Saturday night in November, a few of us went to Spa World, a sort of hot-spring resort in downtown Osaka.  While there, I weighed myself and realized to my shock that I weighed more than I had ever weighed in my life. That I am not slim and have not been since late in the last century is no state secret, but this was a new low in high.

I was upset. I thought I had been doing my best to eat healthfully and remain active, but since my summer holidays in Canada (not a time of moderation), I had been gradually backsliding. The result was screaming at me from the scales.

By coincidence, a notice had been posted around the schools that week that reservations were being taken for the annual company health check (mandated by law here). There was no way I was going in there weighing 4 kgs more  than I had the year before (I checked 2008’s feedback report). I resolved to shape up as much as I could in the 6 weeks between then and the check-up (which I had requested for the 8th of December, but was reserved for the 15th – not one co-worker I mentioned this to got the the reservation time they’d requested, which made me wonder why they’d even bothered asking us).

Now, that didn’t mean going on a crash diet. I mentioned my predicament to some students, who immediately shouted out “Banana diet!” “Apple diet!” ” Natto diet!” (the last one would have been extreme because I would sooner fast, Gandhi-like,  for 6 weeks than eat natto). Fad diets are huge here, because in Japan, sadly, you can never be too thin. But I was trying not to go short-term. I simply cut back on bread and sweets, ate more vegetables and beans, walked more, and forced myself to go to the gym (which, whether I go to or not, I’m still paying for, after all). I didn’t do anything spectacular – I just went three or four times a week and did some machines, dumbells, sit-ups, elliptical, and (because I can barely swim) walking in the pool. I went in the late-afternoon/early evening, between 4:30 and 7 (this is the optimum time, because day-members of the gym are leaving and the office workers don’t start arriving till after six; there also seem to be fewer irritating people about). By the time the place is filled up with evening members, I’m either in the sauna or bathing or heading home for a light supper. My sleep improved, my back felt better because I wasn’t slouching as much, and yes, I could do up a few more collar buttons in a few more work shirts. I didn’t so much lose weight as displace it, but I felt, after six weeks, much better, and somewhat lighter (about 3 kgs down in six weeks).

So it was with uncharacteristic enthusiasm that I went to my annual health check. My stomach was growling because it was nearly 10 AM (I’d requested 9, but so what?) and I hadn’t been allowed to eat for 12 hours, but I didn’t mind. I went through the usual routine (already recounted here and here) with what I thought were flying colours – weight just below last year’s, so I at least broke even; 20/20 vision; hearing normal; blood pressure normal (and 0.4 cm  taller than last year!). The only thing left after the barium and stomach x-ray (the technician was particularly cranky this year, but it must be a pretty boring job) was to have the physician check my heart and lungs with a stethescope and off I’d go.

When I walked into his office (cubicle, really), the first thing he said (and not in a friendly way) was  “Wow! You’re too big!” This deflated me somewhat. I told him as best I could what I had been doing to shape up. He just shook his head and said several times,”Diet! Diet!” (pronounced “Daietto! Daietto!”). “What kind?” I asked, exasperated. “Daietto! Daietto!” he repeated. He was about 7o, scrawny, and looked like a Japanese doctor straight from Central Casting, horn-rimmed glasses and all. As he listened to my chest, I could smell the breakfast cigarettes on his breath, but it could also have been just Old Man Smell (they tend to occur together, though). This old git had the nerve to lecture me on healthy living!

I found out later that he said exactly the same thing to the next guy in line, an Australian who was stocky, but certainly lighter than me; I think this doctor was of the – happily dying off – All Gaijin Are Fat school of Japanese medicine. Well, he put a damper on my day.

But only briefly. I made my way to the traditional post-checkup Mosburger chow-down, and, that ritual over, I finally got into the Christmas mood. It’s amazing what you can make into a tradition, if you put your mind to it. If I’m lucky, staying healthy will become one of them.

Of course, I say that every year, too.

“You can never be too thin”

A Japanese acquaintance of mine, a gynaecologist in Osaka, told me something that happens at her clinic more and more often lately:

“A mother arrives with her teenage daughter, betwen 15 and 17 years old. The mother asks for a pregnancy test for the daughter, who has missed her period once or twice. I do the test, but I know just from looking at her that she’s not pregnant and couldn’t be. The test comes back negative, of course. The mother breathes a huge sigh of relief, and the girl  gets fidgety and waits to leave. Then I always ask the daughter what she eats for breakfast.

“They usually don’t eat breakfast, or much of anything else. I check her weight, and then explain to her that women are so evolved that they  stop ovulating if their bodies are too underweight or do not produce enough nutrients to sustain a fetus. If, in effect, the woman is malnourished. If you eat properly and get more nutrients, I tell her, you’ll start getting periods again.

“Some mothers and daughters are thankful for this information, but there are other mothers who nod impatiently as I’m speaking and then say, ‘So she’s definitely not pregnant?’ I tell her definitely not. On the contrary, her daughter couldn’t get pregnant now if she tried. ‘Well, thank you,’ the mother says, and she and her daughter leave, and rarely come back for a follow-up.

“So lately I’ve been dealing with mothers who are more worried about what the neighbours might think about a teen preganancy than they are about their daughter’s obvious eating disorder.”

With that anecdote in mind, my vote – in a crowded field – for the Stupidest Remark of 2009 goes to supermodel/bonehead Kate Moss’s “Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels.” Skinny and healthy are not synonyms.

NB: (Click here for an article in The Japan Times for more about this)

We are Pooter – He is Us

My favourite read of 2009 was Diary of a Nobody, by George and Weedon Grossmith. I suppose few people actually read the “diary” anymore, but in its day (the turn of the last century) its “author”, one Charles Pooter, was as well-known as Adrian Mole (“Who?”), and Pooterish was an adjective used to describe a distinctly ordinary person who took himself altogether too seriously (actually, I probably first heard the term years ago in reference to Mole).

Charles Pooter begins his diary with the conviction that his life is just as eventful as anyone else’s. But it isn’t really, and  Pooter, in his constant striving to be more middle-class than anybody else, misses most of the real life unfolding around him. This was heady stuff in the late 1880s, when the Grossmith brothers began running ‘extracts’ from Pooter’s diaries in Punch. The series was a hit, and in 1892 the columns were compiled into a book which, while no longer remotely a best-seller, has rarely been out of print.

I read it in dribs and drabs each night before bed this summer. It’s a short book, and I was rationing it for maximum enjoyment. The relatively casual language makes one forget how long ago the book was written (when Pooter mentions catching ‘cabs’ and ‘buses’, I had to remind myelf that he was referring to the horse-drawn variety). He complains about his son’s trendiness, his younger co-workers’ lack of respect and slovenly language. He rambles on about his enthusiasms and methods for self-improvement, tells very bad puns which crack him up, if no one else. In short, he is the timeless, middle-aged, middle-class bore, which was new to society then, but which has never gone extinct. You see him on the train every day.

The only problem was, after reading and enjoying the book, I found it really difficult to sit down at my computer and write a blog entry. Because Pooters don’t keep diaries anymore: they update their weblogs (everyone else is Tweeting). Every idea that came to my mind sounded pretty trivial now: who cared about my annual health check or my neighbour’s latest inane comment on the elevator, or my school director’s Michael Jackson obsession, or the growing popularity of Hallowe’en in Osaka? More to the point, did I? What’s it got to do, as my grandfather would say, with the price of eggs?

Hence the silence lately. But I’m over it now, maybe. What has anything got to do with the price of eggs? It’s nearly 2010.

I’ve embraced my inner Pooter. You have been warned.

“Mount Fuji Looks At Us”

A Sunday evening on the Midosuji Line, heading south to my home in Nagai. I’m standing, listening to Quirks and Quarks on my iPod, gazing into the middle distance (I think I need glasses, finally). The train stops at Showacho and a crowd gets off, prompting a man, who was standing by the opening doors, to walk deliberately (I am aware) behind me. He is in his 60s, wearing unironically old-fahioned glasses, with grey hair slicked back, and he is dressed in a jacket and tie on a Sunday evening (a time when even most men his age dress casually). Pastor? Teacher? I brace myself for the usual Sales Pitch for Jesus and the offer of a pamphlet, which I will decline. He moves into my line of sight and has one of those confiding looks which are comforting when given by a friend but which put me on guard when they’re given by a stranger. Me of little faith. I ‘fail’ to see him – if he wants to talk, he’s going to have to start the transaction.

Eventually, he pounces.

– “Excuse me? Can you help me?” he asks, unfolding a piece of paper. Written on it are two sentences:

We look at Mount Fuji.

Mount Fuji looks at us.

He helpfully reads them out to me (I should add that I’ve turned off the iPod by this time). Then he asks me, very deliberately, “Do you ever say that second sentence in English?”

I am to the point: “No. Never.”

He gives that involuntary hollow laugh that older Japanese people give when they’re embarrassed or perplexed. “But you could say it, couldn’t you?”

– You could say it, but we wouldn’t say it.

– Why not?

– Because it doesn’t make any sense in English. The first sentence is what we say.

– But we say it in Japanese.

– Okay, but we don’t say it in English.

Embarrassed silence. I try giving him the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps he is speaking figuratively, poetically. Perhaps he is using the wrong verb. I try again, offering a face-saving suggestion:

– Do you mean Mt Fuji overlooks us? Because it’s so big? You can say that.

He sighs shortly, impatiently. He obviously has a high opinion of his written English and is not used to being contradicted.

– No! Look! We believe that Mount Fuji looks at us the way we look at it. Because it’s a god. We believe in mountain gods.

– Where I come from, not many people believe that.

– Excuse me, where are you from?

– Canada, I answered, fumbling for my earphones.

He gives me the look that the good cop in a Japanese police drama gives when offering a bowl of noodles to the guy the bad cop is trying to beat a confession out of. Come on, pal – just between you and me.

– But in Canada, you have many mountains. The Rockies look at you? You sometimes say that, don’t you?

– No. We don’t. I’m sorry. (I expect to get a strongly-worded runic parchment from the Druid Anti-Defamation League  of  British Columbia any day now)

– Well. I see. Thank you.

He does not look grateful. Nor does he look like he sees. I put the phones on just in time for the train to pull into Nagai subway. The doors open, and I look back. He is staring stonily at his piece of paper, and I will not be acknowledged. I guess that will show me.

I wonder how many times he went up and down the line that day, trying to find some foreigner to tell him he was right. And why?