Twice a week, Aghaghia Rahimzadeh arises early and heads to a yoga studio in an affluent sector of northern Tehran, a 
mile from her home. Rahimzadeh, who’s the program officer for an environmental advocacy group, studied Ashtanga and Anusara in the United States for 11 years, but these days she practices in a very different environment. Before leaving the house, she covers her hip-length brown hair with a headscarf. A drab brown duster, called a manteau, covers her from shoulders to knees, completing her hijab, the modest public attire legally required for all Iranian women since the 1979 revolution that ushered in the Islamic Republic.
Braving Tehran’s eye-searing smog and notorious traffic, Rahimzadeh passes women in a startling variety of hijab. Some cover themselves from head to toe with the traditional tentlike black chador. Others, more bold and daring and often young?lmost 60 percent of Iranians are under 30how off brightly colored, transparent headscarves and short, form-fitting manteaus that highlight the curves they’re supposed to hide.
Like the sexy manteaus, yoga’s growing popularity in Iran reflects an easing of social restrictions by the government over the past eight years. Before the revolution, public yoga classes were offered in Tehran, but after 1979 most yoga groups kept a low profile for more than a decade. Although the government became more tolerant of yoga by the mid-’90s, it also pushed teachers and organizations to register for supervision by a state-run ministry. Today, teachers in several traditions, including Iyengar Yoga and the Sivananda lineage, offer hatha classes. By law, all are segregated by gender; men teach only men, and women only women.
Influenced by the Sivananda tradition and Indian custom, many Iranian teachers encourage their students to wear loose-fitting, all-white outfits. But Rahimzadeh says that when the hijab comes off, the women in the Iyengar classes she attends usually are wearing tank tops and tights, or T-shirts and sweatpants. The women-only school, a spacious ground-floor room in a private home, has about 140 students registered for each 12-class term. Although instructor Behnaz Vadati, who studied with B.K.S. Iyengar in India, offers instruction for young girls and teens, most of her students are in their 40s, 50s, and 60s. Many are affluent and well traveled and have practiced yoga for 5 to 10 years.
“After class, we gather in a small room decorated with lots of colorful Persian pillows and rugs,” Rahimzadeh says. A samovar in one corner warms a pot of tea, and biscuits and an assortment of sweets rest on a small table. “We sit together, sipping and talking. It’s a time we cherish before we have to cover ourselves and venture back into all the noise, traffic, and pollution.”
Japan
By Andrea Kowalski
After a long day, Shizuka Takamine leaves the world of foreign bond trading in Tokyo’s Otemachi business district to head to an Ashtanga studio in the hip Shibuya district. She’s often exhausted from hours of processing financial transactions, but this Nomura Securities office worker rarely skips her intense two-hour Mysore practice.
Yoga, Takamine says, helps her handle the constant pressure of working in Tokyo’s competitive financial market. “My practice has helped me deal better with co-workers,” she says. “The more grounded my body gets, the more stable my mind becomes.”
Takamine represents a new generation of Japanese yogis. Twenty years ago, most of the handful of yogis in Japan practiced Oki-do (the Way of Oki) Yoga, a form developed by martial arts instructor Masahiro Oki in the 1950s after he studied with several masters in India. Oki-do is still thriving in Japan, although most young people do Power Yoga, says Hikaru Hashimoto, who studied Oki-do in the 1970s and is the president of Tokyo’s Japan Fitness Yoga Association.
These days, new studios and styles seem to crop up monthly, with about 40 or 50 dedicated yoga studios in Tokyo alone, says Nobuya Hashimura, editor of Yogini magazine. Ashtanga-based Power Yoga is the most sought-after style, but Iyengar, hatha, Bikram, and pure Ashtanga are gaining in popularity.
Japan’s economic free fall in the ’90s contributed to yoga’s growth, Takamine says. “In a good economy, we focused on the material world. Now, we’ve shifted. People must go inward to find peace.”
Yoga’s surge in popularity stalled in 1995 when Aum Shinrikyo (Om Supreme Truth), an apocalyptic religious sect, released sarin gas on a Tokyo subway, killing a dozen commuters and sickening thousands more. Yoga’s image suffered because the cult had started as a yoga school. Fortunately, over the past 10 years, that association has faded, and people have turned to yoga again in ever-increasing numbers.
In fact, the Japan Fitness Yoga Association, which includes many forms rom Oki-do, Iyengar, and Ashtanga to hatha and Power Yoga eports a spike in membership from 200 to 1,000 students in just two and a half years. Hashimoto suspects the growth is due to high stress and a long-standing fascination with anything that has to do with Western pop culture. “Japanese women’s magazines have begun to feature Hollywood celebrities doing yoga,” he says. “The Japanese like American culture. They’re eager to capture its essence.”
Kenya
By Fernando Pag Ruiz
In Nairobi’s rainy season, the roof over the Patanjali Yoga and Ayurvedic Center clatters with a cadence reminiscent of Kenyan tribal drums. Some students skip class when the winter brings frequent downpours, chilly days, and flooded, potholed streets, but Anne Muriithi finds the evening cloudbursts comforting after the hot, dry summer. “It’s beautiful to do yoga during the rains,” she says.
Muriithi, a dental surgeon who teaches physiology at the University of Nairobi, first learned of yoga from the novels of Lobsang Rampa, a quirky Englishman who claimed his body had been taken over by the spirit of a Tibetan lama. A few years ago, when a friend invited her to the Patanjali Center, Muriithi decided to check it out. After class, she felt so good that she’s been a dedicated student ever since.
As in many countries where yoga is just establishing a foothold, most yogis in Kenya are from expatriate communities. Nikil Kallungal, the Indian immigrant who runs the Patanjali Center with his wife, Rupina, says more than half of their 100-plus students are from Nairobi’s sizable Indian community. Another 30 percent are of European descent, and just a handful are African.
If you’re a tourist headed off on safari to see Kenya’s famed lions, elephants, rhinos, and giraffes, some outfitters will book a yoga teacher to accompany you, and a few spa retreats near Mombasa, on the coast, offer both yoga instruction and Ayurvedic treatments. But these services cater almost exclusively to foreigners or to Kenyans of Indian or European descent.
“I see a gap between the African community and the Europeans and Indians,” Kallungal says. “They mix in the business world, but not so much elsewhere.” Also, he says, yoga is a luxury in a country where many people live in poverty and where the Indian and European communities are more affluent than the native Kenyans.
Muriithi offers another explanation. “Many Africans think of yoga as a religion,” she says. “So they don’t realize they can practice yoga without compromising their Christian, Muslim, or traditional beliefs.”
Onaya Odeck, the registrar of the University of Nairobi and one of the few Africans to regularly attend Kallungal’s school, echoes Muriithi. “I am a congregant at a charismatic Pentecostal-style church, and when I started doing yoga, some members were worried I would become a Buddhist.” But both Muriithi and Odeck predict yoga’s popularity in Kenya will grow. “I think the younger generation of Africans is opening up to eastern practices, from the martial arts to yoga to alternative forms of medicine,” Odeck says. “Prayer is wonderful, but from a therapeutic, medical point of view, yoga is even better.”
