Is Japanese food fattening?

Not really. You don't see many oveweight people in Japan. Japanese food has a good balance of essential vitamins, proteins, and minerals. They eat a lot of fish and also fresh vegetables and fruit in season. Aside from rice and noodles, they don't eat much starch. And compared to foreigners, they eat few sweets. On the whole, Japanese food is rather light.

Things like butter, milk and cheese are not part of native Japanese cuisine. They use them when they're having western food, but they don't have them with Japanese food. However, they do use a lot of eggs with Japanese food.

Japanese food has many good protein sources - chicken, fish, eggs, pork, and soybeans, for example. They don't eat as much beef in their daily diet as westerners do - its too expensive.