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Come the year 2002, will English football fans be knocking back pints
of Japanese beer as they slouch on the settee watching the World Cup final
from Tokyo? Quite possibly, is the answer. First, Japan has formally applied
to host the finals of the 2002 World Cup competition. And secondly, Japanese
beer has already arrived in Britain – at bus and tube stops throughout London,
Kirin, the biggest brewer, has posters showing a woman with its trademark
dragon tattooed on her shoulder.

If ‘British’ and ‘beer’ sound like two words that no foreign competitor
could ever sunder, just remember that that is what they used to say about
Britain and motorcycles (to say nothing of football). And just like its
motorcycles, cars and video cameras, Japan’s beer is emerging from a home
market where savage competition, automated brew-eries and ruthless marketing
drive the endless creation of new products.

The brutal ‘beer wars’ being fought between Japan’s largest brewers
is already a legend in business circles. Traditionally, the market had been
split between Kirin and its three smaller rivals, Asahi, Sapporo and Suntory,
all producing conventional lager beers. Then in 1987, Asahi launched a
surprise attack with ‘Asahi Super Dry’, a new beer with a light and crisp
flavour. Within a year, its share of the market had gone from 10 per cent
to 25 per cent.

As Super Dry’s sales climbed, each brewer responded with dozens of supposedly
new-taste beers, packaged and repackaged in everything from traditional
brown bottles to cyberpunk cans with silver surfaces as perfect as a mirror.
Because the battle is so fierce, the competitors have all developed sophisticated
technology which enables them to switch production techniques rapidly to
suit the latest marketing fad. ‘Freshness’ is ‘in’ at the moment, pioneered
by Kirin’s ‘Brewery Beer’ brand. ‘The concept is that Kirin delivers beer
to the liquor shop within three days of brewing it, but it’s more to do
with image than taste,’ says Takashi Nakamura of Asahi Breweries.

Asahi’s counteroffensive is its ‘fresh management system’. The company’s
distributors visit stores and repurchase dated beer. The company has sharpened
up its distribution operation, with delivery times down this year from a
week to between two and three days.

Behind these feats are large, highly automated breweries. Asahi’s is
the newest, built in 1991 at Ibaraki, 40 kilometres northeast of Tokyo and
within sight of Mount Fuji. It covers 423 000 square metres, equivalent
to nine Tokyo Domes, and produces 240 million litres of beer annually. When
Ibaraki reaches capacity, it will produce 540 million litres a year.

The entire brewery is run by a system of computer-integrated management.
The central computer is fed in real time with information stored in a database
that logs when beer was made, which lines made it, lot numbers and quality
data on materials, flavour profiles and taste variables. This enables the
brewery to dispatch small, specialised lots as efficiently as large orders.
Like most other Japanese businesses, Asahi operates on the Kanban – or just-in-time
– principle of stock control, which reduces stock-holding to the absolute
minimum.

All the other major brewers run their breweries along similar lines.
Sapporo, for instance, built an extremely modern brewery at Chiba, facing
Tokyo Bay, in 1988. It produces around 270 million litres of beer each
year, enough to fill 430 million bottles with a capacity of 633 millilitres,
the standard size in Japan. And just like Asahi, Sapporo has a sophisticated
stock control system which facilitates competitive delivery times.

Sophisticated computer control also allows all the big brewers to produce
small batches of beer for special festivals or for localities. ‘Local beer
is becoming popular as a gift,’ explained Nakamura. ‘We launched Nagoya
beer last year, and you can only get it in summer, so it has added value,
which is paying off,’ he says.

No Japanese beers have any resemblance to the distinctive, full-bodied
bitter awash with sediment that is the traditional drink of Britain. And
that may prove the fatal flaw if Japanese brewers get serious about the
British market. All the 6.89 billion litres of beer that disappeared down
Japanese gullets last year were lager-based, and all taste rather similar
by comparison with the vast spectrum of bitters, milds, stouts, lagers and
ales available in Britain.

By 2002, of course, things may have changed radically, both on the field
and in the pub, with England the loser on all fronts. Japan launched its
first professional football league this year and teams are already borrowing
famous players like Gary Lineker, to learn the British way of football.
Nakamura and his colleagues at Asahi sound extremely interested in this
strange, dark beer called bitter. Whether they’ll try turning their sophisticated
technology to mass-producing the genuine product remains to be seen.