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Booze is far from the only thing in Japan that has fallen prey to expense-slashing and misguided investing over the past three decades, says Bloomberg Opinion’s Gearoid Reidy.
When Japan's economic bubble burst in the mid 1990s, brewers took advantage of lesser taxes for cheaper alternatives to malt, which rapidly took over the market. But this hurt Japanese beer's global competitiveness. Now tax on real beer has been cut, but brewers argue the prevailing rate is still 14 times Germany's and seven times that of the US