The Japanese Beauty

For my gryouo presentation, I resarched about my country of Japan!
Of course, I already knew some of them, but it was very intersting to learn more about in Japann!

Perception of Weight vs. The Reality of Weight

In Japan, the reality is that only 23% of Japanese women are obese or overweight (the lowest of the 10 countries surveyed), yet 52% of Japanese women perceive their weight to be “too high.” This 29-percent spread was the highest. (Interestingly, while a large number of Japanese women perceive a problem that doesn’t exist, in both Portugal and Argentina, the spread went the other way. While the percentage of obese or overweight women stands at 60% for Portugal and 54% for Argentina, only 39% and 30%, respectively, of women in those countries see their weight as “too high.”)

Satisfaction with Beauty

Here again, Japanese women’s attitudes are vastly different than the other nine countries surveyed. Only 23% of Japanese women consider themselves either “very satisfied” or “somewhat satisfied” in response to the question, “How satisfied would you say you are with your own beauty?” The next lowest group was UK women, 61% of whom are either “very satisfied” or “somewhat satisfied” with their own beauty. (The highest percentages belonged to Argentina (86%) and Portugal (82%), perhaps not surprising given the attitudes to weight mentioned above). Japanese responses to related survey questions about satisfaction with “physical attractiveness” (23%) and “body weight and shape” (20%) yielded similar disparities.

Satisfaction with factors in one’s life: Romantic relationship

Only 16% of Japanese women are satisfied with romantic relationships, by far the lowest level of satisfaction among the 10 countries (next lowest was Canada, at 59%). This figure was so low that the survey puts forth a disclaimer that “this may be due to the fact that the Japanese translation for ‘romantic relationship’ used in the study has far more idealized connotations than in the English version and is thus perceived as harder to achieve by Japanese respondents.” The study does not mention what the “Japanese translation” was, and in any case the reasoning sounds somewhat specious to me. Any readers care to speculate on this? On the same “satisfaction with factors” index, Japanese women also had low satisfaction percentages for “professional success” (18%) and “financial success” (20%), both lowest among the 10 countries. In fact, the only categories that Japanese women didn’t score the lowest satisfaction levels in were “friends” (68% — Italy was lower) and “spirituality and religious faith” (36% — several countries were lower).

Perceptions about Physical Attractiveness/Beauty

Given the low sense of physical attractiveness and beauty among Japanese women — as mentioned, only 23% are satisfied with these aspects of themselves — you would think that Japanese women would feel a strong sense of pressure from society, media, their peers, etc., to be more beautiful, but in fact the survey reveals just the opposite. In regards to the statement, “Society expects women to enhance their physical attractiveness,” only 13% of Japanese women strongly agree. This “significantly less dissonance between society and self” among Japanese women (as noted by the survey authors) is further borne out by the fact that only 20% of Japanese women strongly agree with the statement, “The media and advertising set an unrealistic standard of beauty that most women can’t ever achieve.” (The next lowest agreement percentage is Portugal’s 62%, 42 percentage points higher).

Perception of beauty

In terms of questions related to what “beauty” and “being beautiful” mean, Japanese women’s responses are also telling. In responding to five different statements meant to imply a broader sense of beauty — for example, “I feel most beautiful when I am happy and fulfilled in my life” or “I think that every woman has something about her that is beautiful” — Japanese women showed the least agreement among the 10 countries for each one. The lowest percentage of agreement (57%) was for the statement, “Beauty can be achieved through attitude, spirit and other attributes that have nothing to do with physical appearance.”