Well to be fair it says the Japanese government would be imposing 'financial penalties' on companies and local governments for failing to meet 'specific targets', not fining/locking-up individuals or anything. Whether it would be in the form of fines/taxes, or reducing the amount of money given to them from the main government, is not clear.
They seemed to be going on about the blahblah strain on Japan's health care system and all, as we all know and loathe from them doing it in the west. I couldn't find anything on the net about the story being debunked either.
Edit: Okay, so I found the original article and more specifics.
nytimes.com/2008/06/13/world/asia/13fat.htmlThe word metabo has made it easier for health care providers to urge their patients to lose weight, said Dr. Yoshikuni Sakamoto, a physician in the employee health insurance union at Matsushita, which makes Panasonic products.
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Even before Tokyo’s directives, Matsushita had focused on its employees’ weight during annual checkups. Last summer, Akio Inoue, 30, an engineer carrying 238 pounds on a 5-foot-7 frame, was told by a company doctor to lose weight or take medication for his high blood pressure. After dieting, he was down to 182 pounds, but his waistline was still more than one inch over the state-approved limit.
With the new law, Matsushita has to measure the waistlines of not only its employees but also of their families and retirees.
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Companies like Matsushita must measure the waistlines of at least 80 percent of their employees. Furthermore, they must get 10 percent of those deemed metabolic to lose weight by 2012, and 25 percent of them to lose weight by 2015.
NEC, Japan’s largest maker of personal computers, said that if it failed to meet its targets, it could incur as much as $19 million in penalties. The company has decided to nip metabo in the bud by starting to measure the waistlines of all its employees over 30 years old and by sponsoring metabo education days for the employees’ families.
Some experts say the government’s guidelines on everything from waistlines to blood pressure are so strict that meeting, or exceeding, those targets will be impossible. They say that the government’s real goal is to shift health care costs onto the private sector.
If there's any internet myth, it's that being fat is outright illegal in Japan. The truth of the matter is a bit more complicated than that, as we can see. As for whether they succeeded, who knows.