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Japan Tries To Boost Alcohol Consumption

Japan’s National Tax Agency has launched a nationwide competition to devise new ways to encourage young people to drink more alcohol after-tax revenues from alcohol shrunk to their lowest level in decades.

MASA (talk)(投稿者本人撮影), CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, Wikimedia Commons
Asahi Lager Beer, photo by: MASA
Graphic by: Phil Bainbridge

Alcohol sales have been declining since their peak in 1995 and suffered a sharp fall at restaurants and bars during the pandemic, which brought tax revenues from the sale of alcohol down from around 5% of total revenue in 1980 to 1.7% in 2020.

However, the campaign to help “revitalize” the nation’s liquor industry has drawn criticism from health campaigners and was not coordinated with the health ministry, although the two say they are in close regular contact over alcohol and health issues.

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