Being a Fat Tourist in Rural Japan
Being a Fat Tourist in Rural Japan: The Real Gaijin Experience –
Gaijin (外人), outsider, alien — a current controversial term that Japanese speakers use to refer to foreigners. Whether you choose to be offended by the term entirely depends on your own experience.
Before you venture to travel or move to another country, wherever it may be in the world, we’re all guilty of doing our research — especially on how we will be perceived when we arrive. My own experience involved months of consuming negative media about how people who looked like me were received in the lead-up to packing up my life and moving to rural Japan at 20 years old.
Even if you’ve never traveled to East Asia, I’m sure you’ve heard about the harsh beauty standards citizens impose on themselves. And if you haven’t, I suppose it can be summarized into four characteristics: extremely thin, extremely pale, blonde hair, and an impeccable sense of style. Emphasis on the thin.
We’re often told in the Western world, that while the Japanese are a very respectful race, they are not very forgiving of the tattooed and larger-bodied foreigners, and while this is somewhat true, it’s not in the ways you might think. Now don’t get me wrong, the world is changing, and people of all body types are slowly being accepted worldwide — particularly in tourist-heavy destinations. And while moving to Japan to study was the greatest decision I’ve ever made; I can’t say that it didn’t come with a cost.
While I don’t like to consider myself an easily influenced person, I was very much guilty of adhering to Japanese diet culture (skipping meals and living on Yakult), dressing more modestly — every outfit is revealing when you’re a curvy woman and becoming more reserved, so I don’t stand out against my skinny friends. And yes, it negatively affects your mental health, for a long while it seems.
I moved to a rural town in the south of Japan (Beppu, Oita) in September 2022. And while I had the support of my home university back in England and my host university, it was incredibly daunting. The world doesn’t work the same way, at the same speed, as it does in a city in the south of England and I probably learned the most valuable lessons of adapting within the first few weeks. My commute to campus every morning involved scaling a mountain on a bus probably made in the 50s, where you board on the back, grab a paper ticket, and exit at the front paying in cash — a similar journey into the nearest town (otherwise a 2-hour walk). Despite the blazing heat and tropical humidity, I quickly learned after a few stares from Obaasan’s that as a curvy woman, it was NOT acceptable for me to wear short sleeves or to have my shoulders out. The stares alone were uncomfortable enough for me to conform to dressing more ‘modestly’, and I suppose it helped that my Japanese wasn’t yet good enough to understand the comments they had to have been making.
When my Japanese improved, I learned to stay quiet in public. The attractive Japanese university boys were not interested in me, some stares and photograph taking could be excused as the fact they weren’t used to seeing foreigners in person, but most often they were directed at my very beautiful and beauty-standard conforming friends. On the occasion that they approached us to ‘practice their English’, I learned that they wanted an excuse to talk to my beautiful friends, and why wouldn’t they? I don’t blame them of course, but over the course of a year, it begins to rub you the wrong way. Once you pick up on one thing, the rest of them begin to make a lot more sense.
My friends, bless their hearts, are often oblivious to the struggles of living in a larger body, why should they concern themselves with it? But with this, they were frequent in making suggestions of ‘getting out there’ and “just go talk to them, what’s the worst that could happen?” with regards to the dating scene in Japan since it was going so well for them. And while I was happy to be chatting on Tinder behind the security of my phone screen, I was NOT going to approach the very handsome, very muscly Korean man who frequented my local Starbucks. As a consequence, post-Covid, it still took me an embarrassingly long time to remove my face mask.
It’s not to say that every single member of Japanese society is explicitly judgmental or to deter you, as a tourist, from visiting rural Japan. Despite my own anxieties, I still very much encourage everyone (if ever given the incredible opportunity) to visit Japan — especially rural, authentic Japan. While it made me look at myself and my body type through a critical lens, I learned so much about myself and what I’m capable of just by exposing myself to a culture so vastly different from my own. And now back in the UK, I find myself developing a sense of style and confidence I never had before, albeit a slow process, sometimes throwing yourself in the deep end (and experiencing the harsh realities of alternate cultures) teaches you how to live.
