The photo on the right is a new building that is almost finished in the core of the Shinjuku district in Tokyo. Shinjuku
is the crossroads of the densest transportation hub in the world, with
more than one million people arriving and departing every work day.
This building is just as dramatic for me as the Alcoa building in San Francisco was in the early 1960s. The popular press joked that someone forgot to take the building out of the box. (Photo on the left).
The Shinjuku building looks like a construction made of popsicle sticks. Yet I love it.
What is with the Japanese? I ask because the parents of many of my friends in Tokyo are dying...nearly all in their 90s. These are Japanese who were born before our World War I. Their average lifespan is the longest in the world. Five years, on average longer, than Americans.
Why do these Japanese have the longest lifespans? They do everything wrong by American standards of common wisdom.
The Japanese who are just dying spent their entire 90+ year lives eating white rice as their main nutrition, the air in their cities was badly polluted for fifty years (until 1973), they starved for five years (WWII), they were exposed to the only two nuclear weapons dropped on human populations, they smoked cigarettes heavily and still do, they were not allowed to crawl as infants and they never had much beef or pork in their diet.
Among their distinctly unAmerican behaviors they were never sexual Puritans (men and women often had lovers while they were married), they nearly all masturbated from early childhood, their parents chose their spouses for them, they hated lying on the beach getting sun so they never did, they bathed in very hot water (107 degrees) everyday and they loved riding bicycles, eating seaweed and fermented soy beans.
Why did they live so long? What don't we understand about health and lifespan?