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Are you feeling 100%? We think it can be difficult to stay healthy in Japan. In what ways is your lifestyle healthy or unhealthy?

Hmmn, is anyone anywhere ever feeling 100%?

I don’t think it’s very difficult to stay healthy in Japan, although I do worry about what might happen should I get really sick.

With respect to a healthy lifestyle, I’m certainly living more healthily here in Japan than I did in the States. Of course, I eat almost exclusively Japanese food, which may not be the same with other foreigners (certainly among foreign co-workers I notice a lot of McDonalds and Kentucky Fried Chicken runs). Japanese have the longest average life-span in the world and certainly their diet contributes greatly to this longevity. I’m a vegetarian who eats fish (therefore not really a vegetarian but nevermind) and frankly I’ve never eaten as well or as healthily as I’m now eating in Japan.

While a relatively new thing, sports gyms are growing in popularity and unless you live in the sticks, they’re very accessible and reasonably priced. Biking can be a necessity, especially if you live in the suburbs, and this helps too. Hiking opportunities are a plenty. Frankly, if foreigners are complaining that it’s difficult to live healthy in Japan, they aren’t trying hard enough, or they need to get with the program and start loving Japanese food!

That said, there are many unhealthy aspects of living in Japan. For starters, the daily salaryman regimen of working long hours, getting sloshed after work, and getting the majority of their sleep on the commuter train is certainly unhealthy. Living in Tokyo, while not as dirty or polluted as some metropolises, can’t be very healthy in the long run. I think it’s easier to catch colds here. In the relentlessly hot and humid summers, many Japanese seem able to forgo air-conditioning, but not I and I doubt many other foreigners. So sleeping with the air-con on is a necessity, though I can’t imagine that’s very good for the body and over the long-term I worry about the consequences.

Fortunately I haven’t had to seek health care, and so I can’t directly comment on that aspect, but via anecdotal information I do worry about the standard of health care in this country should I (knock on wood) require it.

What`s the best thing you`ve done here, what are your best memories so far? (anything outside work – adventure, a great night out, joining a club etc..)

Well, I haven’t really done or experienced anything here yet that has knocked my socks off, but I think I would have to say that the time my wife and I went to Shiobara (in Tochigi prefecture) to spend the night and partake in the hotel’s onsen is probably my best memory so far (in 7 short months of living here).

The 1-night getaway came at just the right time, just after my mother-in-law and I had had a big argument, and so I really needed to get out of the house and spend time alone with my wife rather than with her and her family together. The trip afforded us to talk about a lot of things we hadn’t yet had the time to talk about.

It was also nice to drive up there, and use the car to explore the surrounding towns. Coming from car-culture America, there’s something very comforting about being behind the wheel of a car and in control of one’s own destiny, so to speak. And it was my first extended car trip in Japan, so I was proud of being able to drive along the expressway on the “wrong” side of the road.

There’s something to me very luxurious about padding around a ryokan or small Japanese hotel in a robe and slippers, to and from the communal onsen bath or dinner. Despite the other guests, I have this image that the entire hotel is mine, that it’s one big penthouse suite or something. And the bath, well what can one say…one of the true joys of Japan, an onsen bath.

One last thing about that trip to Shiobara. My wife and I are fairly certain that it was during this trip that our child-to-be was conceived. So yes, I think this trip to Shiobara is my best memory of Japan so far.