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Igniting A Fervor For Fitness In Japan
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More than 40 reporters had descended on Yokohama for Blanks's appearance. They did not have much to ask him. ("How do you like Yokohama?" was a typical question.) But they desperately wanted to see and photograph his abdominal muscles.
"So many people think my boot camp is too hard," Blanks told reporters. "What is good is always hard."
Asked to explain his runaway popularity in Japan, Blanks said: "The Japanese people see there is no phoniness to my workout. They see my spirit. Yeah, I am giving them orders, but they see I care. They see my heart."
Then he showed off his abs: Not a Brad Pitt washboard, but impressive for a man of 52.
"Billy is a god," said Kumiko Maezawa, 41, a homemaker who was among the paying and sweating customers when the BootCamp tour stopped in Yokohama.
"I'm not a masochist," she said, "but it is nice to be bullied around by him."
Twice a week, she does the BootCamp workout in her living room while her husband and 15-year-old son snicker at her. She said she doesn't care because "my abdomen muscles have emerged."
The Japanese, who eat a lot of fish and seaweed dishes, are not a fat people, especially compared with Americans.
Just 3.2 percent of Japan's population has a body mass index greater than 30, which is widely defined as the threshold for obesity. That compares with 30.6 percent of the population in the United States, according to figures compiled in 2005 by the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
Obesity among Japanese men over 20 and among children has been increasing, as compared with previous generations, according to the Health Ministry here. But most adult women are no fatter now than they were in past decades.
In the streets of Tokyo, it can take hours of looking before spotting a single person who could honestly be called tubby.
And yet this is the land of the Slender Shaper Fat Burning Machine, a gizmo advertised widely on TV that attaches to the body and supposedly wiggles weight away. There is also black oolong tea, which in the last year sold 10 million cases because of its reputed ability to "suppress neutral fat." And then there's Bust-Up gum, a bestseller here that claims to improve muscle tone, fight aging, reduce stress and make women's breasts bigger.
