The Investigation of International Students’ Lifestyle Habits in Japan — Focusing on Health Perception and Health Behaviors

Shigeki Tatsukawa
(Faculty of Health Science, Naragakuen University, Japan)

Abstract: After the late half of 1980’s, the number of foreigners living in Japan has rapidly increased. In addition, 20’s and 30’s hold more than 50% of all. However, there are few studies about health behaviors and health perceptions of international students living in Japan.

Therefore, focusing on international students, this study aims to investigate how they have a basic awareness of their health status, how they take health behaviors and other related elements, as to make basic materials to refer to when we consider intervention studies about foreign residents’ health. 

296 questionnaires were collected from international students registered in Universities in Japan. They were mostly “not marriage, age 20 to 25 year old, from 42 different countries. As for 63.5% of them answered “Healthy” and “So-so healthy”, “Ordinary” was 30.4%. However, 40.3% of their BMI wasn’t normal, 29.2% of those eat cake and snacks between meals every day, and 30.6% of those who doesn’t move at all.

Our study made it clear that a predominantly high number of international students regardless whether they take health behaviors or not, considers themselves healthy. Moreover, we found that there were variable levels of recognition of national health insurance and knowledge of individual medical expenses depending of their ages. In particular, international students below the age of 20 had less knowledge about national health insurance and individual medical expenses.

The result of our study suggests that there is a need to provide international students with appropriate information of exemplary health behaviors, national health insurance, and individual medical expenses.