In Japan - should you be thirsty for some alcohol and the bars are all closed and so is your local liquor shop - all you need to do is find a vending machine. Yup. Pop in some coins or a bill - and presto! You have alcohol in a can or a bottle. Large or small, the vending machine has then all. Sure some machines are brand specific - only Kirin beer, or only Ashahi beer... but it's there. I once popped in some coins and got a large bottle of Spanish red wine... of course... I had no way of opening it.
The same for the beer bottles. Yes, cans are easier to open, but I was greedy and wanted the largest bottle of beer they had in the machine. When it came out, I discovered I had almost no way of opening it there on the street. That was when I discovered I had unusually strong teeth and could pry the bottle cap off with my molars. Keep in mind - this (1990-1993) was in the days before the fabulous twist-top bottle cap.
So... with booze available through a vending machine, you might think that underage kids everywhere would be boozing it up big time. But that was not the case. I never saw an underage kid sipping anything they weren't supposed to. Which is why I found it strange to come across the following item: Kidsbeer.
While this drink is alcohol-free, it still looks and tastes like beer. I guess in Japan it's never too early to start your kid off on the road to accepted drunken businessman behaviour.
And it's popular, too... selling some 100,000 bottles a month.
Kidsbeer was until 2003, a cola-like soft drink called Guarana that was available at the Shitamachi-ya restaurant in Fukuoka-ken (Fukuoka Prefecture). Restaurant owner Asaba Yuichi (surname first), in a fit of Japanese marketing genius, changed the name to Kidsbeer and suddenly his drink became extremely popular.
Here in North America, we have government agencies that watch for stuff like this - to avoid the exploitation of children... ah, but that isn't the case in Japan. From the restaurant, Asaba had the Tomomasu Co. from Ogi-shi (City of Ogi) in Saga-ken (Saga Prefecture) take over the filling and bottling of his product and had the drink produced in brown bottles resembling beer bottles, and created labeling that looked like beer bottle labels - and to top it off, they made the drink less sweet and more foamy to make it more akin to beer. Sheer marketing genius folks.
Kidsbeer uses the South American guarana plant as the key ingredient - and sells it for about Y380 ($3.80 Canadian/US dollars) for each 330 milliliter glass bottle.Your kid won't get drunk, but he will identify the beer-like drink as a drink he/she will enjoy as an adult.
Can you imagine if you were babysitting a kid in Japan. You know he likes Kidsbeer, but he won't got to sleep when you tell him, so you just give him a real beer in a sippy cup and watch the little bugger pass out asleep. Of course, knowing my luck, the little guy would stay awake and turn into a mean drunk borrowing money and trying to sleep with my girlfriend. Who could I tell? My wife?
Somewhere having a cold one with my five-year-old son,
Andrew 'Bottle Baby' Joseph
