Eating Disorder Information for Japan

Japan diet risks on rise ~ Problems with eating disorders slip under the radar

By Tony Micnicol @ Japan Times Online

When Hiroyuki Suematsu left medical school in the early 1960s eating disorders were still rare in Japan. During his own childhood after the Pacific war binge eating would have been almost unthinkable.

"When I was at elementary school we didn't have enough food to eat. No-one knew what bulimia was."

Even just ten or twenty years ago eating disorders were thought to be much less common in Japan than in other developed countries. But recently Japan appears to have caught up, and the number of sufferers may still be increasing.

A government survey in 2002 found that 2 percent of female high school students in Japan were anorexic. Doctors say that cases of bulimia are even more common. As in Europe and North America, many sufferers in Japan are women in their teens and twenties. Finish article

EDI results of Japanese and German women and possible sociocultural explanations

European Eating Disorders Review
Vol. 13, Issue 6, Date: November/December 2005, 411-416
Mihoko Kusano-Schwarz, Jörn von Wietersheim
Abstract

The prevalence of eating pathology and its relationship to knowledge of eating disorders among high school girls in Japan

European Eating Disorders Review
Volume 12, Issue 2, Date: March/April 2004, Pages: 122-128
Aya Nishizono-Maher, Yuko Miyake, Akira Nakane
Abstract