第1回：なぜ現代の日本人は健康を失ったのかPart 1: Why Have Modern Japanese Lost Their Health?

Over several articles, I will look at the new way of eating that has cost Japanese people their health, and its effects. Reviewing today's health problems from the situation of Japan, rated in the second half of the twentieth century as the most convenient country in the world, will surely give many people important hints for facing their own health.

Because of its traditional food culture (washoku), and because it is a land of longevity by world standards, Japan tends to be pictured as a country where healthy people live.

Yet despite these attractive traditional elements, many Japanese in fact suffer from chronic ill health. Untangling this contradiction in present-day Japan, we find that a large part of it comes from the changes in eating after the Second World War, hidden in the shadow of “convenience.”

The symbol of that change is the convenience store.

Japan's first convenience store opened in 1969 in Toyonaka, Osaka. Then, when America's “7-Eleven” opened in Toyosu, Tokyo, in 1974, convenience stores spread across the country in no time.

From the 1980s on especially, with the benefits of economic growth, the convenience of getting food easily at any hour of the day spread, and convenience store chains, represented by 7-Eleven, Lawson and FamilyMart, became indispensable to Japanese life.

I was born in 1991, so I saw many friends who grew up eating convenience store food as a matter of course from early childhood. At the time, no one imagined that such eating would harm their future health.

But behind the chronic ill health, allergies, and unexplained listlessness and fatigue now spreading in Japan lies the problem of “food quality” hidden behind this convenience.

Looking at much of the food on Japanese convenience store shelves, you can see that most of it is made from wheat flour, sugar, chemical seasonings and additives.

Bread, rice balls, bento, noodles, snacks and drinks are all things that are easy to eat and drink, and by taking them daily, the Japanese have, without noticing, moved from a diet centered on organic local food to one centered on “processed food.”

The food that has become a particularly serious problem is wheat, which has permeated the Japanese diet at a sudden pace.

Historically, wheat is not a staple of the Japanese. Since the Yayoi period, when farming culture began, rice, millet and other grains, and tubers have long been the basic staples. Wheat spread to ordinary people from the Edo period, but it was then a food limited to specific areas where rice would not grow, and for most Japanese it was only a “supplementary food.”

You see almost no wheat-based eating even in prewar Japanese films.

The event that greatly changed this happened quite recently: the food policy after the Second World War.

Postwar Japan was in extreme food shortage and faced the problem of many dying of malnutrition. From the large stock of farm products left over in the US by the sudden end of the war, wheat in particular began to be exported to Japan in large quantities.

This began right after the war, but most important was the Agricultural Trade Development and Assistance Act (Public Law 480), enacted in the US in 1954. From then on, wheat that could not be consumed in the US began to be supplied to Japan in large quantities, very cheaply or free.

But Japan, historically distant from a wheat-centered diet, did not easily shift to one. The Japanese government, at a loss over how to dispose of the large amount of wheat flour imported from the US every year, even though food production had already recovered and rice was sufficient, eyed the school lunch system as a place to dispose of the unneeded wheat.

So bread-centered school lunches spread to schools across the country under government leadership, and a new way of eating was born in which growing children ate bread nearly every day. This policy, which began when the question of improving postwar nutrition coincided with the circumstances of US agriculture, seems at a glance a good one, but that holds only for a moment after the war, and in the long run it became a source of serious problems.

The problem is that the land's way of eating, nurtured over thousands of years around rice and other grains, and a wheat-centered way of eating enter the body in quite different ways.

Since the war in particular, as people began to eat bread, pasta, ramen and sweets made from wheat flour, cheaper than rice, as a daily staple, many have come to carry, without realizing it, ill health such as chronic allergic symptoms, poor digestion, loss of concentration and fatigue.

Not only wheat but sugar and additives are highly addictive, so once you start eating them you cannot stop, which is also a problem. The effect of eating them from childhood brings health risks immeasurable over the long term.

As a result, Japan's eating became richer, but the “quality” so important to diet dropped markedly, and Japan fell into what is called “new-type malnutrition,” a state in which calories are sufficient but needed nutrients are lacking.

We are all now facing the serious health risks behind the convenience of the modern diet. What is especially a problem is that many people feel this is normal and no longer even have the chance to reconsider, from a historical viewpoint, the diet rooted in their own land.

That is why we now need to think again about two things. Are our bodies truly adapted to the food we eat every day? Are we simply losing our health in exchange for convenience?

This deserves fresh attention now that washoku culture has spread in the West. Food is nurtured in the climate and life of each land, and it may not enter the body in the same way once moved elsewhere. We must also think about whether washoku, away from its land, could cause health risks not seen before.

Noticing this problem is the first step toward regaining the healthy life that people naturally have. A society whose people are not healthy cannot become good.

In the articles that follow, I will dig into the history of Japan's wheat-centered eating and its effects, with scientific perspectives too, and finally consider concrete ways to improve today's health problems by recovering “traditional eating.”