Blaine's latest...

are two stories about women and social pressures in Japan and South Korea.

This story looks at why Japanese women are so thin - and they are incredibly thin. While American women have gained weight - obesity has risen from 17 percent to 35 percent since 1980, Japanese women (other than those over age 70) have actually lost weight over the past 25 years.

If you go into most clothing stores here, even Banana Republic in expat-friendly Roppongi Hills, there aren't many items over a size 6 and size 0 is very common. (This, and the fact that almost everything is sized for shorter people, saves me heaps of time and money.) In the US, many women gain weight during pregnancy and never lose it, but several Japanese moms at Arno's or Lucinda's school have had babies and bounce back below 100 lbs within a few months.

But many women take thinness to scary levels; it's anecdotal, of course, but I've seen many more anorexic women here than I ever did in NYC.

Blaine's second story (which actually ran first) is about the difficulties of being a working mother in South Korea. One woman, a marketing executive with a 6-yr-old son, took out full-page newspaper advertisements to declare "I Am a Bad Woman" because she is sick of being criticized by her husband, son and mother-in-law for continuing to work.

The story includes this astonishing statistic: "South Korean law allows a full year of subsidized parental leave, but intense peer pressure at work means that working mothers usually take little time off, according to government surveys. Only about 35,000 parents in this country of 49 million people (my italics) took advantage of child-care leave subsidies last year."

It's fascinating to compare lifestyles in Japan and other countries we visit to the American way of life; every country has its own specific pathologies. In Japan, it's incredibly difficult for Japanese women to have full-time, high-powered jobs and also have children - in part because Japan's immigration laws don't allow them to hire lower-cost immigrants for childcare. (Expats with certain work visas can, by contrast, hire immigrants as nannies.) The Japanese also smoke much more than Americans do.

But it's impossible not to live here and not recognize that the U.S. has serious food issues. It's not just about obesity rates, but (I think) because the food industry creates and Americans accept a high-volume array of processed foods that have too much salt, sugar, fat and calories. In Japan, food is seasonal, served in much smaller but still filling portions and lacks the American corn-syrupy sweetness, even in chocolate. Arno recently took a small bite of a Milky Way that was leftover from Halloween, declared it was too sweet, didn't eat the rest.