In 1966 the Pacific Science congress in Tokyo announced that the most important and urgent problems Asia fades at present are Population and Nutrition. The Congress has set up the Standing Committee for further research and education. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, the world also faces the serious situations in Nutrition and Population in either undernourished or malnourished and the Asian Area has the lowest status among the seven areas of the world; the caloric intake per capita in the South-East Asia including the Far East is only 2,070 in 1961, whereas in Africa it is 2,360, in South America 2,370, and in Europe and America over 3,000. After the Pacific Congress, last year, the public in Japan has become aware of this condition in Asia; especially among the university educated women the need for taking more serious responsibility in solving the problem has been realized. In fact the Japanese Association of University Women which had been studying about Asian countries Since 1963, has taken further interest in the international cooperation at university level and voluntarily organized the Asian Fellowship Program in 1964 for the purpose of raising the public health standard of the Asian Area and proposed to work with the Ceylonese Federation of University Women, and to them an all expense fellowship including travel fees was offered and an excellent woman grantee, a graduate of the University of Ceylon was here in Japan of be trained in the field of nutrition at a Japanese university during the academic year of 1966. This was realized with the selection by the Scholarship Committee of the University of Ceylon. As a health educator at a women's university, the author has long been conscious of the need for educating the university students in the matter of food and nutrition. Having come through sufferings of all kinds during and after the World War II, the author came to believe firmly that, to raise level of health of the student, nutrition and the practice of good eating habit should have been and still should be the project to be considered in health supervision as well as in courses on health education. In 1959 the Health Committee was organized at Tsuda University and the first and main activities taken up were surveys at our dormitories in relation to student eating practices, and later we surveyed the day students. We found that some of the students spent over \1,OOO a month on vitamin and other pills. The need was shown great and we educators paid more attention to nutrition programs at our dormitories and to other educational programs. The author had the opportunities to attend two Asian Conferences of Experts on Student Health, one at the University of Ceylon in 1962 and the other at the University of Chiengmai, Thailand, in 1966, and has come to realize more firmly that the importance of educating students in the matter of food and nutrition should be stressed more positively within the university community. The author was greatly surprised, especially in 1962, at the critical situations of our neighboring countries within the university environment; some universities were considering awarding meal tickets as part of the student scholarship instead of in cash. The students were suffering from lack of nutrition and diseases caused by it. Nutrition was the theme of one working group; there were five other working groups, Health Education and Physical Training, Health Supervision, Tuberculosis, Mental Health, and Other Diseases. In our country, the effort for improving nutrition was started at the beginning of the twentieth century, mainly in order to control beri-beri prevalent at that time. Since then nutrition research has been continued; in spite of various cultural, socio-economical problems which have been greatly influential on the life of the nation, the nutritional improvement was developed and, especially
(View PDF for the rest of the abstract.)