> police acts swiftly

Perhaps I misunderstood what you meant by "swift".

> I find it quite ludicrous to think their restaurants represent what they eat on daily basis

I have lived with 2 different Japanese family (one younger, one older) and I was referring to the younger one when writing my previous comment. You say that restaurant doesn't represent what they eat, but again this is not my observation; restaurants and prepared meal (bento) are socheap—price-to-purchasing-power compared to Western countries—that many people don't even cook for themselves. So yes, it's absolutely relevant.

> Not sure why Violent crime would be better than non-violent crime for feeding your kids

I never said it was. But hunger definitely makes you more violent and more irrational. I excluded non-violent crimes because people usually exclude those when thinking about a country's safety. There are a lot of scams in Japan, for example.

> They would never hurt a fly.

Most people would never hurt someone. Most people are lawful. But most criminals are not from well-off families and grew up needy. Perhaps there is a causation, perhaps not.

> But most criminals are not from well-off families and grew up needy.

Petty or to-some-extent violent criminals. White collar criminals, the worse kind of criminal, usually come from good/rich/powerful families (I'm generally speaking, not talking about Japan specifically)

Which is why I initially mentioned violent crime. The one people tend to care about the most.

nitpick: I'd argue the worse types of criminals are war criminals, like for example Hitler, who is, in my mind, worse than someone like Bernie Madoff.

I think it's more likely that social pressure to control people's weights is responsible for Japan's low BMI, not anything to do with the food. Japan is the land of vending machines and convenience stores. It's easy to eat junk food all day if you want to. But people will notice you getting fat, and unlike in Western countries they're likely to criticize you for it.

"Bring back shame again" increasingly feels like something that would actually be beneficial in the long run.

We tend to hit a Goodhart’s Law situation, where focusing on weight and BMI comes at the expense of actual health. That's how we get eating disorders and other mental health issues as well, so as usual it's complicated.

Assuming you are actually from the US, your point feels a lot like system justification[1] theory hard at work... If close to 50% (or even more) people around you have moderate to serious weight issues, I can imagine how you end up normalising the status quo, looking for explanations that rationalise it...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_justification

Just an anecdata but on my last stay in Japan I lost a couple kilos in a good month. Even though I did abuse kitkats.

FWIW if you're on a trip it might counter-balance: you might be more active with fewer idle time, and the local food might also be harder to fully process. I saw that on a Spain trip where it made absolutely no sense I didn't gain weight touring tapas places for a week.

It was a business trip matching my typical routine. I'd say I was even less active because apparently running in Tokyo sucks.

Also some anecdata, but I think it depends so much on the person: I gained 10 kilograms by living more than a year in Japan.

I ate healthily so I wasn't fat by any means (in fact, I'm really skinny), but I ate so much that I think this is the reason I gained some weight. I ate a lot of rice (my rice portion was usually more than a Japanese person's entire plate).

Every time I'm in japan I walk far more than I do while in the US. I also end up going up stairs a lot more than I ever need to in the US. Good public transportation makes a huge difference.

I'm euro and runner/cyclist so I doubt that was a factor. I also had my bicycle with me for some rides on off days, but it wasn't beyond my usual mileage. Maybe even less, because riding road bike in Tokyo was an experience that made me realise how good I've it back home. Surroundings hills are nice, but getting out of the city sucks big time.

BMI is mostly useless metric when comparing genetically diverse cohorts. Weight gain is mostly in fat and that is proportional to fat cell count. There is a saying "nerve cells are born and die, but fat - lives forever". The truth to it is that at an adult age fat cell count is mostly constant and mostly genetic. As you get fatter you don't produce more fat cells, they just get fatter, pun intended.

There is huge genetic diversity between geographic regions / ethnic lineages in this regard. On one end you have northern european / african lineages, on the other end you have far east lineages, with other lineages somewhere in between, with northern european / african lineages having the largest fat cell counts, east asians the lowest. Furthermore, north european / african lineages tend to have fat distribution much more biased towards subcutaneous fat, whereas east asian lineages are biased towards abdominal fat, so many of the problems associated with high body fat (not insulin resistance) are seen at lower body fat percentages in east asian lineages.

On top of that, body fat percentage does not map to BMI. BMI may roughly linearly scale with body fat percentage around the "healthy" region, however there will be huge offset between genetic cohorts, including sex.

You should expect east asian BMIs to be lower across the board given similarly "unhealthy" diets.

Not the person you responded to, but this is a topic that fascinates me; do you have any resource to learn more about that? One that explains in average human terms would be appreciated!

https://www.youtube.com/@benbikman This dude is awesome