A Healthy, Chubby Japanese Man (genki na debu chan)

In light of official reports indicating a still prevalent tendency to masculinized obesity and overweight in Japan (Ministry of Health Labour and Welfare, 2015), this article explores the experiences of 28 Japanese men grappling with bodyweight control. Aged between 24 and 67, 3 of the men were postgraduate or undergraduate students, 7 self-employed, 17 company workers and 1 retired. Fourteen hold a university degree, 1 completed senior high school and 10 finished 3-year junior college. Twelve were married and 16 were single. Ten of the participants have been requested to lose weight because of being at risk of developing metabolic diseases, the rest have been called “chubby” (debu) and all of them have unsuccessfully tried to lose weight. A set of two, in-depth semi-structured interviews were conducted with each participant in Tokyo and Osaka in June and July 2015, 2016, and 2017. Grounded in symbolic interactionism, the interview analysis allows for a reading of the participants’ embodied subjectivity in line with three axes: autodidact self, gendered self, and emotional self. The article highlights how the feminization of care has an effect on the participant’s daily interactions. In conclusion, the article underscores the salience of “emotional attachment” to food (Lupton, 1998, p. 158), the “emotionalization” of food consumption and the emotionalization of the “fat body” in understanding their experiences dealing with corpulence in a country where slimness appears to be “ethnicized.”