Blanks draws a full house

Looking buff, sounding bossy and wearing army boots, a fitness guru from Southern California has become a pop-culture icon in Japan. Billy Blanks did it the old-fashioned American way — with infomercials.

Besides sudden fame, Blanks has sudden fortune in Japan, selling merchandise worth more than $130 million.

Over the past nine months on late-night television, Billy Taicho (Commander Billy) has been shouting at the Japanese to get off the couch and "squeeze the fat" out of bellies that, by most standards, are not all that fat.

"Feel the power!" commands Blanks, who first felt the power of infomercials in the 1990s, when TV spots for his "Tae Bo total body fitness system" made him pots of money and helped him land appearances on ER and The Oprah Winfrey Show.

Blanks has made himself into a household name in Japan by tapping into two lucrative streams that flow from the modern Japanese psyche: an unselfconscious passion for fads and a self-conscious concern about being overweight.

His campy drill-sergeant routine has enabled Blanks to sell more than a million copies of his Billy's BootCamp video series, which includes four DVDs and has been priced at $132.

Polls in Japan show that 70 per cent of Japan's 127 million people now know who Billy is and what he does at his imaginary boot camp.

For the second time in less than six months, Blanks is cashing in on his phenomenal fame, touring Japan and packing thousands of former couch potatoes into arenas across the country.

They happily spend $60 for a BootCamp T-shirt and the chance to kick, punch and march themselves into exhaustion while being barked at by the man they affectionately call "Bee-Lee".

"At my age, nobody but Bee-Lee bosses me around and that to me is part of the attraction," said Masaru Mochizuki, 39, a systems engineer for Unisys in the port city of Yokohama. "Plus, my tummy has really gone back to what it was like when I was in high school."

Blanks led 600 or so of his disciples through an hour of sweat-soaked delirium in a harbour-side convention hall in Yokohama and afterwards briefly interacted with the media.

More than 40 reporters had descended on Yokohama for Blanks' appearance. They did not have much to ask him. ("How do you like Yokohama?" was a typical question.) But they desperately wanted to see and take photographs of his abdominal muscles.

"So many people think my boot camp is too hard," Blanks told reporters. "What is good is always hard."

Asked to explain his runaway popularity in Japan, Blanks said: "The Japanese people see there is no phoniness in my workout. They see my spirit. Yeah, I am giving them orders, but they see I care. They see my heart."

Then he showed off his abdominal muscles: Not a Brad Pitt washboard but impressive for a man of 52.

Kumiko Maezawa, 41, a homemaker who was among the paying and sweating customers when the BootCamp tour stopped in Yokohama, said: "I'm not a masochist but it is nice to be bullied around by him."

The Japanese, who eat a lot of fish and seaweed dishes, are not a fat people, especially when compared with Americans.

Just 3.2 per cent of Japan's population has a body mass index greater than 30, which is widely defined as the threshold for obesity. That compares with 30.6 per cent of the population in the United States, according to figures compiled in 2005 by the Paris-based Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development.

And yet, this is the land of the Slender Shaper Fat Burning Machine — a gadget advertised widely on TV that attaches to the body and supposedly wiggles weight away.

There is also black oolong tea, which in the last year sold ten million cases because of its reputed ability to "suppress neutral fat". And then there is Bust-Up gum, a best-seller here that claims to improve muscle tone, fight aging, reduce stress and enhance women's features.

There is, however, more to the Billy boom than anxiety about one's shape. It allows the Japanese to luxuriate in one of their favourite cultural pastimes — a semi-ridiculous fad.

In his 2003 book The Image Factory, the prominent cultural critic Donald Richie argued that the Japanese throw themselves into fads not to assert their individuality but to celebrate their membership in a group. He argues that people everywhere — including supposedly individualistic Americans — do more or less the same thing but that the Japanese do not waste time and effort on a pretence of marching to a different drummer.