In Japan menopause is 更年期, kounenki. The medical society puts it at ten years, and gives the average age of the last period as around 50.
We have added a new section to the site: Women's Health in Japan. It is about menopause, and about the medicines for it that sit on drugstore shelves here.
Who it is for
Women living in Japan who are somewhere in the menopausal years, and who have found that almost none of the information about it is written down in English. The medical society's guidebook on hormone replacement therapy is in Japanese. The leaflet folded inside the medicine box is in Japanese. So is the letter from your city about screening.
You can manage a lot in Japan without reading Japanese. This is one of the places where it starts to cost you something.
What is in it
Three guides to begin with. One on what the class number on a medicine box means, and what it decides about who can sell it to you. One on the treatments the medical society sets out, and what national health insurance covers. One on the screening your city offers and who is on the list for it.
Alongside them, medicines you can buy without a prescription: Inochi no Haha A (命の母A), Rubina Meguri (ルビーナめぐり) and Tsumura Kamishoyosan (ツムラ漢方加味逍遙散エキス顆粒). For each one we set out what it is sold for, the dosage, the ingredients and the warnings, translated from the Japanese leaflet in the box.
Where it comes from
Everything comes from Japanese sources: the package inserts, the manufacturers' own product pages, the health ministry's guidance and the medical society's guidebook. Where something comes from the product page rather than the insert, we say so.
We do not use the English versions manufacturers publish, and there is a reason for that. Kobayashi's English leaflet for 命の母A defines 血の道症 as covering mental anxiety and frustration; the Japanese one says psychological, neurological and physical symptoms. Tsumura's English sheet renders のぼせ感 as “flash feeling”. So the translations here are made from the Japanese.
What it does not do
It is not medical advice, and it is not a substitute for seeing a doctor. We do not offer symptom checkers or anything else that would work as a tool for diagnosis, because that is not ours to give. We do not list prices either, since they differ from shop to shop.
What comes next
More medicines as we work through the shelf, and more guides. Period pain is likely to be the next one.
If there is a product you would like us to go through, or something about menopause in Japan you have been unable to find in English, let us know and we will look into it.