Sweeping the Nation

Being basically an over-grown village, the Japanese nation is swept by fads like nowhere else. Something will be reported in the media (the fact of reporting makes it believable) and the next thing you know 127 million people will be jumping on the band wagon.
Consider:
Some 10 years ago Fuji Television reported on Super Time (news program) that putting empty soft-drink bottles (clear ones with water in them) around in your yard would keep cats away. Imagine the convenience of this technique! Only the other night we were awakened by the yowls and howls of a couple of cats outside; if we could have made recourse to putting a few strategic plastic bottles here and there, we would have gotten a good night's sleep. Anyway, the fad swept the nation and people were putting empty plastic soft-drink bottles around their gardens and houses to keep the pesky varmints away. Even as recently as 5 minutes ago (yes, I did go out and check) about ten 1.5 liter, soft-drink bottles can be seen keeping sentry around a neighbor's house.
The Experiment Design: In the interest of scientific inquiry, I decided to conduct experiments on the two members of the feline species that keep us on as staff here. Their names are Pickle (a Japanese stray) and Tweedle (a farmed Himalayan). I wanted to find out if soft-drink bottles filled with water would affect their normal behavior in any way.
As I have limited time to conduct a lengthy experiment (I want to finish this article before I drip too much sweat into the keyboard), I decided to cut right to the chase.
Experiment #1:
1. Fill soft-drink bottle with water.
2. Place soft-drink bottle next to sleeping Tweedle.
The Reaction:
none
The Reaction Upon Awakening:
1. Outstretched nose sniffs soft-drink bottle.
2. Cat goes back to sleep.
OK. But Tweedle is a fancy, designer cat. Who KNOWS where her genes came from. Plus, she is old and not heavily into youthful things – like actually moving.
Experiment #2:
1. Find Pickle
2. Can't find Pickle, so I will report on her at a later date.
Anyway, these fads sweep the nation like no other.
Consider:
In the early 1990s in the city of Sendai (there is some debate about the origin, but Sendai seems to be the front runner), high school girls somehow got the idea that wearing floppy socks around the lower part of their legs would make their legs look nicer. This was coupled with rolling up the waist of the school uniform's skirt to make it shorter, exposing more of the upper part of the leg. Instantly, the fashion swept the nation and high school girls across the country were rushing to flatter their appearances with these new floppy socks. By the early 21st century the fashion had faded among main-stream high school girls and been co-opted by a subcultural group. They can be still seen here and there today (I looked out my window, but as school is in session, I was unable to confirm or deny that they are still visible on the streets here. I can't actually see the road so well from this vantage point either.).
Consider:
The banana panic of 2008 struck without warning! Japanese women (let's brazenly make a huge generalization here) tend to be faddy. And nothing screams fad more than the latest diet craze!
Some Background:
Japanese women (continuing the brazen generalization) also tend not to be fat. We saw a woman who went through an entire pregnancy and birth without us ever being aware of the whole thing, so little did she change her physique. Wait... that is not fat, but anyway... Japanese women tend to be petite and thin. By and large, among those women who THINK they need to lose weight and who would jump at any diet that promised easy and spectacular weight losses, only a tiny fraction really needs it. Nonetheless, a fad is a fad and (see first generalization) there are those who pay less attention to the details of it before taking the plunge.
The Diet:
Popular TV shows at first, and then later picked up by fashionable magazines and other venues, reported that a person (person = woman) could lose a lot of weight by eating bananas in the morning. You needed to eat one banana or more for breakfast with water, eat a regular lunch and dinner and go to bed before midnight (Time's report here). So basically, instead of the usual Japanese breakfast which consists of a small bowl of rice, some miso soup, a softboiled egg and maybe a tiny piece of fish, you would eat bananas. The key of course is the later eating of the "regular lunch and dinner". Japanese "regular lunches and dinners" fall into the petite category by American standards (omg... I need to write about this one restaurant in California...), so we are not talking a huge intake of calories at the later end of the day. Only one mid-afternoon snack, no desserts.
The Results:
Bananas were literally swept from grocery store shelves within a day. There were no bananas to be found ANYWHERE in the country, so fast did the fad take hold. Criticism by nutritionists and health experts notwithstanding, the fad stayed for several months (probably because the lack of bananas kept a lot of dieters from starting their new-found regimen), and then disappeared as quickly as it materialized. On TV and in magazines, of course, people (people = mostly women) reported dramatic weight losses, but amongst the general population there did not seem to be any significant change. Bananas remained hard to find for several months until the banana importers (all the bananas are imported) managed to bring in enough to restock the shelves. The fad had dissipated by then, but so many bananas were "in the pipeline" to feed the fad (pardon the pun), that the stores could not find place for them. Tables were piled high with the yellow fruit and checking out the supermarket yesterday, I found that even now there seems to be an oversupply of bananas.
Japanese supermarkets invariably have a special table for fruit and vegetables that are approaching their shelf life limitations. Everything is way cheaper there. The overlarge pile of bananas on that table looked pretty good too!
Return to Experiment #2:
3. Found Pickle lying around on the deck (not sleeping).
4. Place soft-drink bottle 10 cm from her nose.
The Reaction:
1. Cat gives lavish display of affection by rubbing on deck chair and deck railing near the soft-drink bottle (but does not rub on soft-drink bottle).
2. Cat lies back down in same position 10 cm from soft-drink bottle.
Pickle is a pure Japanese cat – replete with all the DNA and genetic predispositions of several thousand years of Japanese catdom. If she was not bothered by the soft-drink bottle, no cat would be.
Conclusions:
The results of my scientific experiment pretty much speak for themselves; the fad (as has also been subsequently reported in many places in Japanese) is based on bogus information. Nonetheless, this being Japan, traditions die hard.