Raw Japan
Slices of Japanese business, politics and life
Calling time on Japan’s alcoholics
When Japanese civil servant Yoshiyuki Takeuchi started to lag his colleagues at work, he joined a growing number of his countrymen looking for solace from their problems in the bottom of a glass.
“People who started after me would go further in their careers just because they finished college. I tried to stop that sense of ‘why always me?’ by drinking,” said the 50-year-old, who quit university as his family couldn’t afford it.
With liquor consumption growing sixfold in the last 50 years in Japan to match the country’s economic affluence, alcoholism has become an increasing — but poorly grasped — problem in a nation where booze is readily available from convenience stores, where evening television is awash with liquor ads and where bonding with workmates is typically done over a few cold ones.
Economic losses from drinking problems top 6.6 trillion yen ($73 billion) a year and some 800,000 people, or 0.6 percent of the population, are estimated to be alcoholics. The rate is smaller than the United States or Europe, but is rising as more women and elderly become addicted to drink.
Despite the growing number suffering from the condition, alcoholism is not seen as a disease and there is no systematic approach to dealing with it. Methods of prevention and intervention are usually viewed as lacking in Japan, and even medical professionals often fail to understand that merely fixing physical ailments caused by alcoholism won’t stop patients from drinking.
Katsuya Maruyama of Kurihama Alcoholism Center, a leading hospital for treating alcohol dependency, said Japan is overly tolerant when it comes to drinking too much. “There is no proper teaching on how alcohol can be dangerous, so no one knows alcoholism as a disease,” he said.
Cheap brews soothe econ blues
Cheap beer-like drinks are in fashion as suds lovers try to hold onto their daily treat while saving money to ride out tough economic times. Sales of these drinks have been very strong and beer makers are aggressively marketing their products, all of which is just going to further dent the market share of beer, which has been in steady decline for years.
Nowadays, a 350ml can of regular beer will set you back about 210 yen ($2.20) in Japan, while low-malt ”beer-like drinks” go for around 130 yen.
Under Japan’s tax code, beer is defined as having a malt content of two-thirds or more of the raw material and carries a liquor tax of 77 yen per 350ml can. The tax on the new drinks is only 28 yen, since they use no malt. Instead the beer makers use pea protein or other materials to create a beer-like taste.
Total shipments of malt-free drinks jumped 30 percent in June, industry data showed, while those of beer were almost flat. Today, malt-free drinks account for nearly 30 percent of what used to be the beer market.
The brief history of beer-like drinks is that of a hide-and-seek game between breweries and tax authorities, which have desperately tried to protect sacred tax revenue. In 1994, Suntory released a drink with 65 percent malt content, pioneering a category called “happoshu” (literal translation = sparkling booze), offering a cheap alternative to beer. But two years later, the government, after seeing the growing popularity of such “tax-saving” drinks, lifted taxes on low-malt alcohol beverages, prompting breweries to release new products with even less malt to flee the cheaper liquor tax category.
But the taxman just wouldn’t give up. The government raised liquor taxes again in 2003 so that the ultra low-malt booze would not enjoy much of a tax advantage. Then came malt-free drinks, brewers’ answer to the tax authorities’ tenacious chase.
G7 drink row adds to Japan government woes
Japan’s finance minister denies he was drunk at a G7 news conference but opposition lawmakers sense blood in the water and are demanding he be fired, adding yet more pressure on a deeply unpopular government that faces an election this year.
The story is the Internet phenomenon of the day in Japan as TV stations and newspapers issued stories calling attention to Shoichi Nakagawa’s behaviour at the news conference at the G7 gathering in Rome over the weekend.
In Japan, at least, the question of what was wrong with Nakagawa when he appeared in front of the media has completely overshadowed the issue of the financial crisis.
His speech sounded slurred at the media conference and at one point Nakagawa, his head down and eyes closed, mistook a question directed at the BOJ governor as one for him.
The embattled minister attributed his behaviour to having taken too much medicine, including cold medicine and said he had only sipped wine at lunch, ahead of the news conference.
“It is a fact that I didn’t conduct myself clearly, and I feel I must put it straight,” Nakagawa told reporters on his return to Tokyo. “I did not drink a glassful.”
My suggestion!
Let him stay in his position. He is probably good at what he does.
-
Resident Raw Japan Expert
-
