世論 What Japan Thinks

Healthy beer is a phrase one doesn’t hear too often, but that’s basically the title of a recent survey conducted by MyVoice into health-related beer-like drinks.

Demographics

Over the first five days of March 2008 14,373 members of the MyVoice internet community successfully completed an internet-based questionnaire. 54% of the sample was female, 15% in their twenties, 39% in their thirties, 30% in their forties, and 16% in their fifties. Note that since the legal drinking age is twenty, teenagers were excluded from this survey.

I got a free can of Kirin ZERO for going to see a cross-dressing dancing General Douglas MacArthur (don’t ask!) but my wife gave it away to the father-in-law before I got a chance to sample it. I tried Tanrei Green Label and it was just as much swill as the full-sugar Tanrei!

In Q7, being good for health is an interesting answer. I suspect it is not just a poor wording (”can control calorie intake” might have been better), but I’ve seen people on television interpret “not so bad for you” as “can consume as much as I like.” One strong memory is of an actor knocking back two or more bottles of red wine a night and being shocked when the doctor told him that that was a bad thing.
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With Kirin having previously announced a price rise in beer next February, and with Asahi today also making a similar announcement, it is timely to look at this survey conducted by goo Research in conjunction with the Yomiuri Shimbun into the rise in the price of beer.

Demographics

Little demographic information was given for this survey, bar that 1,092 people over the age of 20 were interviewed at the start of November 2007. Not even the sample sizes for the questions were listed!

It may be interesting to compare the results of this survey with a recent one on the rise in instant ramen prices.

One thing I’ve never understood is that comparable beers from all the three big brewers are the same price, and they are sold at almost the same price everywhere from the largest megastore to the smallest vending machine. Surely they cannot be running a cartel?

Note that currently a 350 millilitre can of beer retails for about 207 yen from a convenience store.
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I don’t know if it’s seasonal or just that I’ve been prompted to recall them by translating this survey, but there does seem to have been rather a number of advertisements for premium beer on the television and in print these days. The survey that prompted this recall was on my MyVoice into premium beer.

Demographics

Over the first five days of October 2007 16,882 members of the MyVoice internet community completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 54% of the sample was female, 17% in their twenties, 40% in their thirties, 27% in their forties, and 16% in their fifties. Note that since the legal drinking age is 20, no teenagers took part in this survey.

The exact definition of “premium beer” is not discussed, but it is presumably based on price differentiation. Q3 lists the main beers that are considered to be premium. For me, Yebisu is the only one in the list I’d choose; Guinness, a brew I like back in the UK, is brewed under licence here and has a very unpleasant bitter, tarry aftertaste.
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Back in May goo Ranking published the results of one of their quick web polls into people’s favourite foreign beer. As usual for goo Ranking, no demographic information is available, and the score for each beer is the percentage of the votes it received compared to the number one choice.

Sadly, but not really unexpected, Budweiser (not the real Budvar, sadly) scooped number one slot. However, many of the beers voted for are, I would guess, local beers brewed under licence. I’ve had “Indian” Kingfisher lager that was imported to Japan from the UK, and in Los Angeles I once had Asahi Super Dry with “IMPORTED” boldly stamped on the label, only to find the small print indicating it had come from Canada.
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infoPLANT recently released a survey, performed using their usual method of a menu option within the DoCoMo iMode service, to find out what people thought about beer, happoshu and third-sector beer. Note that this survey was self-selecting, but since it has nothing to do with mobile phones, there should not be too major a problem with the survey population this time. 7,668 people, 61.0% female, responded to the survey, conducted over one week at the end of February.

Beer almost always means lager in Japan, happoshu is a low-malt beer-like drink(can’t stand the stuff myself), and third-sector beer is wheat and malt free, and instead is made from pea and other vegetable proteins and the one time I drunk it it tasted suprisingly nice and smooth.

I think I have found one statistic I’ve been seeking for a long time - here we have 13.8% of men in their twenties reporting daily beer consumption. Looking at a table from my homeland of Scotland, we can see that in 1998 only 7% of males aged 25 to 34 drunk any alcohol daily. However, looking at those men who drink at least once a week, the Scots have a significantly higher figure, although remember that includes all alcohol types. Similarly, but even more markedly, a mere 3% of young Scotswomen drink any alcohol daily, whereas over three times as many, 10.1% of Japanese women in their twenties consume beer daily. These differences are repeated across all the age groups.

Contrasting the daily figures with the weekly ones, I think it is a fair conclusion to draw that whilst the Japanese may overall have a lower frequency of alcohol consumption than the Scots, there are a higher number of regular drinkers amongst the Japanese population.

Note that neither survey addresses the volume of consumption, but with the recommended maximum weekly intake of 21 units for men and 14 for women, two large half-litre cans for men or two small 330 ml cans for women of beer-like drinks will most likely put the daily drinkers over the safe limit, and that ignores any other alcohol the Japanese may be consuming. Taking the adult population of Japan to be about 103 million and taking 18.6% of that figure we get the tabloid headline figure above, which does make certain assumptions, of course, some that might make the figure lower and others that make it higher.
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