Yongfook is a web producer and usability consultant based in Tokyo

Evil takes many forms in this world. McDonalds, Reality TV, “Electra” - all these things can be said to be the true and physical form of the Satan upon this mortal plane by any reasonable person. McDonalds, well, that is evil because it is contributing to the evolution of generations of Westerners into gelatinous fatheads who can’t muster the effort to stand up without being bribed with pies, and it exploits small Puerto Rican 8 year olds by employing them to rip up old Chinese newspapers into tiny, tiny pieces for use as “volume-increasing filler” in the hamburgers, in return for less penis-beatings with the paddle that night by their rotund, German floor-manager whom they have to refer to as “Pa”.

Reality TV is more of a personal dislike but I just despair when I think how much potentially good TV programming there could be if it weren’t for the fact that many shows nowadays have producers behind them whose whole job is to spend all day thinking up new and outrageous ways to get any kind of heightened reaction from the audience, peaking at some point in the near future with shows such as “Is It Adultery If It’s With A Manatee?” and “Bankrupt Midgets On Drugs - Still Human? And If So, Will They Eat Shit For 100 bucks?” and think that this idea is worth 3 seasons of my viewing time.

Electra is evil because it allowed Bob Sapp to do a cameo, which has in turn led to him stumbling into roles in other hollywood movies, and the western world really doesn’t need that.

Bob Sapp, if you don’t know, is the guy with the Best Publicity Agent In The Whole Fricking World, Ever. He is a guy who supposedly had some kind of 2nd rate American Football career and decided to pack it all in and come to Japan. For several reasons including the fact that the Japanese public instantly warmed to him going “Gwa ha ha!” all the time by way of a catchphrase, and the fact that he was also a huge crazy-acting black guy who managed to - just by living and breathing - reinforce all pseudo-xenophobic stereotypes about foreigners that many people in this country still harbour and relish, he practically exploded in popularity over here to the extent that eventually you couldn’t get him off your TV screen.

He would be on chat shows (along with some complementary waif-like and trembling translator woman at once terrified and leaking into her pants with starstruck glee), commenting on sporting events, endorsing every food product under the rising sun and at the peak of his popularity - where his earnings started to outgrow his massive, throbbing breasts - you could buy Bob Sapp dolls at the toy store. Usually his TV commercials would involve him saying “Gwa ha ha” a number of times and gulping down a big helping of whatever instant ramen, ice cream sandwich or sports drink he was peddling that week. Sure, it was probably demeaning to become such a superficial commodity but who gives a shit about pesky moral semantics when you are screaming “Gwa Ha Ha!” all the way to the fricking bank? I wouldn’t.

Anyway today I will introduce another form of Evil, perhaps more evil than the above mentioned Evils by a factor of 9.

This is “Happoshu”, or as I tend to refer to it, UnBeer.

Now, I consider myself a beer drinker. Not in the kind of “I only drink beer made by Trappist monks and fermented in barrels made of finest unicorn ivory, phnaaar!” pretentious way, who dotes on those who (ha!) still buy their beer from actual shops and don’t get it flown in on sheets of silk all the way from Europe via charter Concorde - by “beer drinker” I mean just that, I tend to only drink beer. Spirits, I’m not really a fan of as they tend to make me puke up uncontrollably too much, and lady girly chick drinks with names like “Fizzy Fruit Joy Delight Spritzercham” I tend to stay away from as I’m quite happy just killing brain cells on a night out and don’t need to add “destroying tooth enamel” to the list of ways I frick up my body at the weekend.

The way in which this beverage is evil is that UnBeer has all the characteristics of beer in terms of appearance, smell, place it is sold in the supermarket, package design etc etc but despite all of that, it is not beer, which can be utterly confounding.

Like a human who has been infected with a variation of the BodySnatcher parasite and has had their insides sucked out and replaced with something arbitrary and useless like broccoli, UnBeer is brewed in a process that vaguely resembles the RealBeer making process on the whole, but certain ingredients are left out and one or two steps in the process are significantly different, making it actually illegal to refer to this as real beer on the packaging. Happoshu literally just means “sparkling alcohol”. However, everyone and his mother has a different variation on the specifics of this process and the reasons as to why they can’t legally call this beer. Some say they don’t let the concoction ferment long enough for it to be called beer, others say it is because artificial ingredients are used for flavouring instead of natural ingredients such as hops etc. I, however, tend to think that the reason it cannot be called beer is because it is in fact Rat Piss.

Happoshu is almost universally cheaper than real beer, often costing as little as 100-yen a can. To the uninitiated it can be a total crapshoot as to whether the substance you are purchasing from the beer-looking section of the supermarket is in fact real beer or this poor man’s doppelganger, bent on destroying you with it’s mouth-rotting shitfizz. Its only until you start reading the Japanese text on the can that you pick up the tell tale signs such as the absence of the words “beer” on it or slogans that proudly state things like “now with 25% less chemicals!!”. Happoshu often tries to describe itself as “crisp” or “clean tasting” but your marketing-bullshit-detector should safely interpret this as “watery” and “full-o-protobenzinephosphate8723K”.

What makes it even more confusing is the fact that Happoshu isn’t manufactured by no-name brands that you would know to avoid, it is brewed by the big boys. Every major beer brewery in Japan (for example Suntory and Asahi) make both real beer and happoshu and for some reason sell them in amazingly similar-looking cans. In this world ruled by capitalism we have to expect this as the large companies will want to capture every income bracket and probably also need use up all those pesky leftovers from the RealBeer making process that they can’t get the license for to dispose of legally.

I suspect that the latter is half true, that happoshu is probably an exercise in efficiency to try to use up all the supplies they have, which going by the way most happoshu tastes is the metaphorical equivalent of an Eskimo family sitting down to dinner, consuming an entire seal except for its arse, then sitting around wondering what to do with the arse at which point the retarded son picks it up, wears it as a hat and goes “whee!”.

Much moreso than RealBeer, Happoshu has almost universally across the brands adopted a bizarre “healthy lifestyle” approach to their marketing campaigns, in which you usually see a group of tanned, healthy-looking Japanese men just finishing some kind of “Xtreme” sport like rock climbing or surfing whilst dead, and celebrating each other’s go-getting outdoorsy spirit by swigging down an entire glass of UnBeer, which in reality would be INSANE to do in a post-sports dehydrated state, and would be tantamount to pouring flour directly into your brain. This contrasts almost mathematically perfectly to the actual target market of happoshu, usually:

a) tramps b) emaciated foreigners who have no clue what they are buying, along with the dubiously-jam-filled-looking, fish-mayonnaise-filled donut they are also about to purchase. c) cheap sonsabitches who turn up to a party with happoshu and proceed to drink the real beer that other people brought. These people need to be raped over and over again by a herd of genetically enhanced narwals.

“But so fricking what? If its beer-like and only around 100-yen a can (about US) you can’t really complain” I hear you twats say as you line up to buy a 6-pack, tripping over your knuckles as you go. And you would be right in thinking so until the next morning when your mouth tastes like the inside of a panda’s rectum, your brain has become hypersensitive to anything except the sweet darkness of sleep and you want to stand up but your basic motor functions have been completely replaced by a voice in your head going “haha don’t be stupid” whenever you try to move. Because you see, drinking too much happoshu will result in the worst, most wretched hangover you will have ever experienced, evAr.

However, happoshu doesn’t just “give you a mean hangover”. No. Hangovers are the physical form of the Guardian that the character Happoshu summons in Final Fantasy XIII: The Chronicles of Fricktopia to deal your entire body Level 20 Internal Hemorrhaging, losing you over 10′000HP and 4000MP for every can you drink. Telling someone after a few beers that the substance he is drinking is in fact happoshu is like throwing a cobra at his face and setting him on fire. Its the promise of an awful day tomorrow. A dark, dark curse. You are a fool if you ever drink this.

Thusly, I’m drinking and reviewing 3 different kinds of happoshu today. These were all selected amongst the myriad varieties at the supermarket for different reasons:

Suntory Super Blue - it was the cheapest kind there (a tad over 100-yen) and I wanted to see how bad the cheapest one would be. Suntory Harunama - it has an attractive cherry blossom illustration on the front which smacks of the kind of blatant seasonal opportunism that I have come to quietly love to hate, and I wanted to see if the flavour was different in any way whatsoever to regular happoshu. Asahi Fruits Brewery - a combination of happoshu and fruit juice.

Instead of a wordy rating, this entry I AM TREATING YOU to a video review. You will need quicktime to view the video.

VIEW HAPPOSHU VIDEO REVIEW WITH ALL YOUR MIGHT

Cheers.

Ps - The Gallery Its been up for a while now but in case some of you don’t know, I’m using a photo sharing service as a gallery now. I find flickr to be a pretty good service for photos as you can comment, use the “tag” technology (which is rather cool), and easily upload / organise photos using the provided software. The only drawback is that the free account is limited slightly, but the features are such that I will definitely consider upgrading to the premium, unlimited account.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 16th, 2005 at 6:13 pm and is filed under Food Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.