On the heels of the wildly popular ''French Women Don't Get Fat," we can now read why Japanese women don't get fat -- or old.
If only everyone would just eat and act like the Japanese, says Japanese-born Naomi Moriyama, we'd all be a lot better off. In ''Japanese Women Don't Get Fat or Old: Secrets from My Mother's Tokyo Kitchen," a memoir cum self-help manual cum recipe book coauthored with her American-born husband, William Doyle, Moriyama suggests that changing American eating habits could help create slimmer and more healthful lives. Dieting is not required.
Moriyama, a marketing consultant in New York, offers attractive recipes, advice on creating a Japanese kitchen, and some wisdom. She has evocative food memories of growing up in Japan, too. She compares American ice cream trucks in neighborhoods here to the Japanese vendors at home who bring their trucks to neighborhoods and roast sweet potatoes over hot stones.
Of the secrets in her mother's Japanese kitchen, one is that it is not enough to eat like a Japanese person: You must also behave like one. For instance, in Japan, people do not hop into their cars to run multiple unrelated errands. They benefit from the incidental exercise of walking and climbing hundreds of steps when taking trains and using one-speed bicycles to shop and to pick up their children at school.
There are plenty of food-related secrets, too. The most important may be the concept of ''hara hachi bunme" -- eating until you are 80 percent full. Portions are small and partially determined by plate size. Foods are eaten separately and enjoyed for their flavors as well as their eye appeal. Indeed, in Japan, everyone is a food stylist. Japanese women are exhorted by school principals to make sure the lunch they prepare for their children is well balanced and beautiful to behold.
Moriyama introduces the ''seven pillars of Japanese food" -- fish, vegetables, rice, soy, noodles, tea, and fruit. Deconstructing the Japanese diet, she explains each element in separate chapters, studded with mostly accessible recipes. These include history lessons, chatty anecdotes, references to ''samurai shopping lists," and details of husband Billy's Japanese food experiences and culinary skills. Actually, they are more distracting than appealing. The book needs to be slimmed down. By the time Moriyama gets to her final how-to chapter, with menus and a guide to the recipes, you are apt to have forgotten the food. Her penchant for detail, including measurements of plate size, is overwrought. When is the last time you shopped with a tape measure?
Still, her descriptions of Japanese ingredients are excellent. She reminds us that the Japanese diet is based on fish, rather than beef, with all the nutritional benefits (including less fat). We also get a good sense of the form and flavors of the food.
She admits to being inspired by ''French Women Don't Get Fat." Although both titles are catchy, Moriyama's is overstated. Alas, many Japanese women do get old and chubby. Japanese television is filled with infomercials for liquid diets, exercise machines, and undergarments that squeeze the life out of you. Japanese women are the longest-living in the world, but their daughters and granddaughters are getting bigger and heavier. The Japanese blame it on fast food and the Western diet. Eating disorders are on the rise.
Moriyama calls Japan a ''food Utopia" -- and that is an understatement. You can't walk 15 paces in Tokyo without passing a food establishment that looks and smells so enticing it is bound to separate you from any resolve. This evokes the concept of ''enryo" (restraint). As Moriyama points out, Japanese women eat sweets but do so in much smaller amounts than their Western counterparts. There is no premium on gluttony in Japan -- or elsewhere in Asia. Koreans speak of eating like a crane, which, due to the shape of its beak, can only pick at food. That way, you will grow old as gracefully as that elegant bird.
When I asked a Japanese friend who recently lost about 15 pounds how she did it, she held her hands close together to indicate small portion sizes. To start the day, she said, ''I went back to eating a Japanese breakfast of miso soup, rice, and fish or egg." Moriyama calls it a ''Japanese power breakfast." Maybe we should start there.
Debra Samuels lives and writes in Tokyo.
© Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
