Popular images of drinking in Japan often involve office workers sharing toasts and casting off their inhibitions. But there's a hidden dark side: more and more women in Japan are drinking heavily, some to a dangerous degree, and becoming addicts in the process.Shino Usui, a pharmacist and organizer of an alcoholism recovery peer group at a hospital in western Japan, can attest to the fact that the ratio of female drinkers in the country is rising at an alarming rate.As someone who used to hit the bottle daily, she recognizes that combating alcoholism as a woman in a society where men are n…READ FULL ARTICLE
