My personal favorites includes the Godzilla-sized "Mega Macs," which weigh in at 754 calories and contain a staggering 45.9 grams of fat, and the "Mega Teriyaki" which, thanks to its sweet lemon sauce and sugary teriyaki sauce, muscles up at 903 calories and 64.3 grams of fat all by itself!

(And I’m being sincere in labeling these as "personal favorites" - because they’re really tasty - even though I can practically feel my arteries clogging up as I eat them.)

While I’m not a social scientist, nor do I pretend to have any special analytical powers, I have spent long stretches in this region during each of the past 20 years, meaning I’ve got plenty of anecdotal evidence that seems to support the data.

For instance, many younger Japanese are taller than they were in the past. When I first started going there in the late 1980s, I towered over most of my Japanese counterparts. Now we stand eyeball to eyeball. My wife, who at 5'6" was regarded as tall when she was growing up, is now average height.

In general, Japanese kids are also bigger, which is painfully evident - literally - as modern-day children try to cram themselves into school desks designed and installed in schools across that nation generations ago. Many actually have to duck when entering and exiting buildings with ceilings and doorways that are now too "low." Still others can’t sleep comfortably on traditional tatami mats, which were the measuring standard for hundreds of years, because the mats are now too short.

With change, however, comes opportunity.

Companies that design, manufacture and sell comprehensive obesity-management programs - not just games, or such one-off items as pedometers, scales and the like -stand to make out big.

One such firm is Konami Corp. (ADR: KNM), which we twice rode to profits (once 49.91% and then 39.31%) earlier this year in our sister publication, The Money Map Report. While most people know Konami as a video-game maker, the company actually operates a string of health-care clubs and is at the center of Japan’s new "healthy" movement.

Showing some real forward thinking, Konami has been able to market some of its leading games, like Dance Dance Revolution, as physical-education programs and medical devices. And those products are now being adopted worldwide by frazzled physical education teachers who find themselves faced with unmotivated, overweight kids. The problem is particularly acute here in America, where as many as 17% of our children are now obese, according to various studies.