White Paper Reveals Many Japanese Eat Alone www.nippon.com

A 2017 white paper published by the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry, and Fisheries revealed that 15.3% of 1,786 survey respondents ate all of their daily meals alone more than half of the week, which is five percentage points higher than the survey result for 2011.

The survey respondents mentioned various reasons why they eat alone. The most common reason cited was that it was “unavoidable due to reasons of time and location” (35.5%), followed by those who “had no one else to eat with” (31.1%) and who “didn’t mind eating alone because it was more convenient” (27.3%).