POCARI SWEAT: From underdog to cultural touchstone
Underdog origins
While we take Pocari Sweat for granted nowadays as a conbini staple, the drink had a less than glamorous origin story. An employee of the Otsuka Pharmaceutical company, Rokuro Harima, was on a business trip to Mexico in the late 1970s. After coming down with a particularly debilitating case of the runs, he took himself down to the local hospital for treatment. When Harima eventually managed to see the doctor, the advice he received was simply to keep himself hydrated with soda drinks. As he was leaving the hospital - Harima, frustrated that there wasn’t a better option than soda, noticed another doctor coming out of surgery and drinking straight from an IV pouch to rehydrate himself in the blistering Mexican heat.
This got Harima thinking and he set out to tap into a new market in Japan with a drinkable IV. Up to this point, the Japanese market was dominated by the likes of carbonated drinks like Coke & Mitsuya Cider. Gatorade had been on US shelves since the 1960s but Japan had not yet ventured into the world of sports drinks.
pocari sweat hits the markets in can form, 1980 | source: cnn
Otsuka researchers set about experimenting and trialed hundreds of ways to make the new beverage drinkable. Eventually, on a whim, they tried combining the IV drink with a previously rejected citrus powder drink. The combination surprisingly cancelled out all of the bitterness of the IV drink and Pocari Sweat was ready to hit markets.
Launching onto the markets as a completely new concept, Pocari Sweat initially struggled to gain any traction with Japanese consumers. Despite this, Otsuka had already invested significant amounts into R&D and giving up wasn’t an option. They doubled down and invested huge amounts into advertising and handed out free samples outside sports stadiums and bath houses in an effort to get the drink to catch on. Otsuka was also restricted by the lack of vending machines - while it’s hard to imagine, 1980 Japan wasnt littered with vending machines the same way it is now. The company therefore had to invest heavily in grassroots campaigning and providing samples to local mom & pop stores to convince them to sell their product. All up, 30 million free samples were handed out in 1980 alone.
a mid 1980s advertisment for pocari sweat
The Golden Age
However much it struggled early on, the marketing efforts paid off and Pocari had already became a household name by the summer of 1982 and started its journey towards the status of cultural icon. Pocari’s rising popularity coincided with the beginnings of Japan’s bubble economy. The mid 1980’s saw the value of the yen rise at absurd rates as the central government deregulated financial institutions and eased fiscal policies. This led to an insane rise in the price of land and stock prices in Japan - at one point, the Emperor’s palace in central Tokyo was worth more than the entire state of California.
This booming economy was highly volatile and ultimately unsustainable but in the short term, it led to a vast amount of money available for spending in Japan. Consumers suddenly had more money than they knew what to do with and pop culture rapidly turned to one based entirely around capitalist spending and opulence. Pocari, as an emerging product, was able to capitalize on this and appeal to a nation drowning in expendable income.
a mid 80’s promotional still for pocari sweat neutral
Playing on the pop culture trends of the time, Pocari created a series of eye catching advertisements throughout the 1980’s that accelerated its meteoric rise. Memorably, Pocari released a commercial featuring Cindy Crawford - at the time one of the world’s biggest supermodels. The commercial was quintessential 80’s kitsch with Crawford dressed in gladiator armor and swinging a sword through an open flame while a mutant rabbit drank a can of Pocari.
a promotional still from cindy crawford’s 1986 pocari commercial
Another incredible commercial came out of Pocari’s attempts to break into the US market. In 1984, a commercial was aired on US tv sets during the NFL. The ad consisted of a classically 80’s montage of meaningless sports moments and iron workers set to a kitschy synth bass line and intercut with clips of people drinking from a can of pocari. To make it even better, a woman’s voice periodically whispered the word ‘pocari’ over the music.
a still from pocari sweat’s 1984 nfl commercial
While these ads seem ridiculous in hindsight, they undeniably accelerated Pocari’s meteoric rise and by the mid 90s, the drink became the first non-alcoholic Japanese drink to hit $1 billion USD in total shipment value. While the NFL commercial wasn’t a particularly success and Pocari never really took off in the US, the product was picked up throughout South East Asia and the Middle East where it’s still turning huge profits to this day.
An icon of faux nostalgia
In recent years, a series of cultural movements such as vaporwave in the early 2010’s and the current resurgence of city pop have led to a kind of faux nostalgia surrounding the aesthetic of 1980s Japan. Particularly in the last 10 years, Pocari Sweat has emerged as a symbol of this bygone era. Perhaps due to its simplistic and recognisable branding, the drinks logo has been co-opted and incorporated into album covers, clothing, fan art and more.
poster for a 2017 party with pocari sweat as the central theme | source: space bar san diego
It’s a strange phenomenon, this sense of faux nostalgia - that someone born after the bubble economy had already collapsed can feel a yearning for those days. It is possible though, in part, due to Pocari Sweat. People today are just as familiar with the drink and its unchanging branding as they were back in the 80s. In this way, it becomes a bridge - a constant between that era and ours that can link us to bubble era Japan. It has transcended itself and become a cultural touchstone.