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Height Increase Result of Intermarriage? Increase in Population Leads to Shorter People? Japanese Women Increasingly Curvaceous? Change Due to Sedentary Lifestyle? The Perils of Eating Whatever One Wants To |
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Japanese Women Increasingly Curvaceous? |
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Japan's Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology compiles a yearly report on the health of schoolchildren, based on data collected from health checks conducted regularly at all Japanese schools. The first report was issued in 1900, and so although the war created a gap in data collection, the reports now represent a 100-year record of the physical development of school-age Japanese children. According to the latest report, the average height of 17 year-olds for the year 2000 was 170.8 centimeters for males, and 158.1 centimeters for females. The same figures for 1900 were 157.9 and 147 centimeters, which means that in the space of 100 years, the height of Japanese teenage boys has risen by 12.9 centimeters, and of Japanese girls, by 11.1 centimeters. This is a remarkable increase when one considers that the height of Japanese of the Jomon and Yayoi periods increased by only five to eight centimeters over the space of some 10,000 years. Mind you, this increase is not limited to Japan. In the developed countries of Europe, America and elsewhere too, average height rose by about one centimeter a decade throughout the 20th century. Holland in particular is renowned for the height of its population, the average for 18 year-old male youths being about 180 centimeters, or a 10 centimeters taller than their Japanese peers. Body height is only one of the noticeable changes that the Japanese physique has undergone in recent decades. Let us look at another, fairly interesting change. Most of you have no doubt seen a "dress form" —life-size models of the human torso on a stand that are used by apparel designers and dress makers, which can often be seen in clothes shops. Japan's National Institute of Bioscience and Human-Technology (Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry) recently employed Human Form 3D Shape Averaging technology in a joint project with the Bunka Fashion College to develop a new dress form for women's apparel. The researchers arrived at the shape for the dress form by collating and averaging three-dimensional shape data for various parts of the female form according to the Institute's proprietary methodology and creating an actual dress form based on the figure that emerged. |
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| The new dress form is strikingly different from previous models used in Japan. The bust is fuller, the waist more slender, and the lower abdomen slightly rounder. One gets the overall impression from the new form that the figures of Japanese women have come a long way towards resembling those of their Western counterparts. The Institute's Dr. Makiko Kouchi, creator of the new dress form, says "We measured the shape of various parts of the bodies of about 100 women to create it. However, since it was developed to serve as a dress form for designing outerwear, the women were measured in their underwear, and so the larger bust is at least in part an effect of brassieres." Dr. Kouchi and her colleagues are endeavoring to develop techniques that will enable the utilization of detailed data regarding the shape of human bodies in three-dimensional design, with the aim of facilitating the creation of better-fitting clothing, shoes, glasses and anything else that is worn by humans. The key to achieving such an aim is to measure not only linear dimensions of various parts of the human body, but also their exact shape. Dr. Kouchi, who has been measuring the dimensions and shapes of Japanese bodies for many years in the course of her research, has the following to say about the changes she has witnessed in the Japanese figure: "The Japanese traditionally have long torsos and short legs, but in recent years, their legs have increased in length in proportion to the overall size of their bodies. However, the average weight of women has changed very little despite the increase in height. Another feature that is changing is head shape. Seen from above, Japanese heads are becoming much rounder. Feet are changing too. The feet of Japanese are generally wider than those of Caucasians, but the width of young people's feet at the base of the toes is becoming narrower. You find that when young people these days complain of badly fitting shoes, it is often not simply that the shoes are too tight, but rather that the feet, due to their narrowness, slide forward within the shoes, resulting in the toes being bunched up at the tip. Increased tallness is not just a Japanese phenomenon, but has happened in many countries throughout the world, and so the gap between the Japanese and Europeans has not closed noticeably. Nevertheless, the increase in height itself during the last hundred years is so astounding in its scale that you could almost call it a revolution of the body." |
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