Although smoking is a big problem, obesity rates in Japan are wildly lower than in the U.S. Part of this could be exercise. A lot of it has to do with diet and portion size. And maybe some if it has to do with peer pressure as described by a journalist who used to teach high school in Japan.
They called him Mr. Jumbo.
I was teaching English at a high school in Hiroshima, Japan, in 2001, when a group of boys approached to introduce me to a classmate.
“His name is Jumbo-san—Mr. Jumbo!” the boys said, laughing.
“Why do you call him that?” I asked. “Because he’s big-sized,” one boy replied, curling his arms out from his waist and wobbling around in an imitation.
A smiling boy stepped forward. He was about 5 feet 8, maybe 175 pounds. Hardly jumbo. I was a couple inches taller and more than 10 pounds heavier than he was. “You’re not that big,” I told Mr. Jumbo. “In America, you wouldn’t even make the football team.”
Of course, peer pressure itself may work in entirely different ways in different cultures. When I was in junior high, a phys ed teacher described a race between me and another kid as the battle of the bulge. Not only wasn’t I motivated to lose weight, I reframed his comments and took him to mean I was well-endowed. Mr. Jumbo indeed.
