A yoga boom that first began in the United States is growing fast in Japan with the world's largest yoga training organization now offering courses in Tokyo's Ginza district.
In the one month since Bikram Yoga, which teaches so-called hot yoga, launched its first training program on the 11th floor of a Ginza building in January, about 2,200 people have signed up for the classes.
"About 70 percent (of them) are women in their 20s and 30s who hope to lose weight or get rid of stress," said Kenji Ehara, 36, from the business division of Bikram Yoga, which runs about 1,500 fitness studios in various countries.
It plans to open four such studios in Tokyo and in Sendai, Miyagi Prefecture in northeastern Japan, by the summer. Plans call for it to establish 10 new courses a year.
Its Ginza studio is said to be a reproduction of those found in India, the cradle of yoga. The room temperature is set at 40 degrees Celsius and the humidity at 55 percent.
About 40 people in T-shirts, including several men, greet their instructor, bottles of water ready at their feet.
The distinctive feature of hot yoga is that its enthusiasts go through a series of 26 different poses, including one called "Garudasana (eagle pose)," while practicing conscious breathing and perspiring heavily.
The creator of hot yoga, Bikram Choudhury, 60, said during a recent visit to Japan that his discipline is more akin to body care than exercise, adding that it places only a small burden on joints and muscles because the high room temperature helps warm the body and increases the healing power of the body and mind because the blood circulation improves.
Takashi Kadokura, a 34-year-old economist and representative of BRICs Research Institute, estimates that the number of Japanese yoga trainees chiefly practicing hot yoga increased by about 70,000 to about 300,000 last year.
He also said that the market for yoga mats and other yoga-related products has expanded to 19.8 billion yen, up nearly 5 billion yen from a year ago.
The latest yoga boom in Japan followed similar developments in New York and Los Angeles in the 1990s.
Classic yoga centering on meditation was transformed into a more modernized form during the hippie era in the United States in the 1970s, but later merged with a school of yoga that attached importance to breathing and posture.
Power yoga caught on in Hollywood where well-known singers, actors and models became its devotees, including Madonna and Meg Ryan. Called Hollywood yoga, it gained popularity in the U.S. and Europe.
Japanese women's magazines and TV stations began introducing it several years ago as "a celebrity diet."
In Tokyo where a wide range of yoga courses are available, men and elderly people have also shown interest. Even couples and family members take lessons on weekends.
Kadokura said the number of yoga hobbyists is growing in big cities outside of Tokyo such as Osaka and in Hyogo and Aichi prefectures.
He also said yoga is being diversified to include courses for pregnant women, and predicted that by 2010 more than 1.2 million will be practicing yoga and that the related market will balloon to 70 billion yen.
http://asia.news.yahoo.com/060329/kyodo/d8gktad00.html
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