Note: This is an excerpt from an essay-in-process. Some parts of the narrative will feel unfinished, as I am working through ideas presently.
Every year, Japanese companies offer their employees a free, full-body health check, or Ippan Kenko Shindan, as part of a nationwide effort to encourage healthier lifestyles and to prevent avoidable diseases. Students, too, who attend both regular and private schools, are typically made to undergo similar testing, as companies and schools are legally required to make these annual health checks available. Though these tests are generally noninvasive—blood work, x-rays, weight and height measurements—they are also controversial; individual health reports are sometimes given to the company’s Human Resources department, making these checkups a covert way for employers to monitor their employees’ general wellbeing. While the generous takeaway might be that companies in Japan value their workers’ physical and emotional health, it’s also a way for some employees to assess and, if certain test results come back alarming or abnormal, to intervene for the sake of regulating employee performance. But in my experience working in Japan these last few years, these tests don’t feel holistic or preventative, but bizarrely accusatory. Even the health reports we receive back from the hospital are written in the style of a report card. Weight: B+. Red Blood Cell Count: E (see doctor immediately).
My move to Japan in 2021 came at a time when health, both mine and the world’s, felt forefront and unavoidable. The global pandemic was more than a year in, and I had started taking Zoloft, an SSRI medication for anxiety. My body experienced significant fluctuations in shape and size as a consequence of the medication’s side effects, and I became an insomniac, too—unable to sleep soundly or fully for several nights in a row. I started developing strange rashes and first-time thyroid issues—immune system responses, I was told, from having relocated to Japan from an entirely different part of the world. And all of these issues became the undercurrent through which I started my new job as a teacher at a private high school in Tokyo. Everything was different: the school rules, the office rules, the social rules. As I was new and also foreign, I didn’t speak much with my colleagues that first year. I kept to myself, meticulously studying the ways of the office, and seldom made eye contact with those whose desks surrounded mine. There were a few times when the other English Language teachers would walk downstairs and inquire after me, but I mostly lived through those initial months as a quiet cog in the larger machine of things.
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