4/1/2005

You know spring is around the corner when iced tea commercials are popping out like cherry blossom, except everywhere at once. Kirin is going full gear these days, with both the “western style” tea (and the cute idol Aya Matsuura drinking loads of it), and the “Nama Cha” green tea ads on TV, big inflatable bottles in Shinjuku station, posters everywhere etc. But their tea is the same as last year’s, re-vamped a little. Hajime however is brand new and if you are a sucker for really new stuff that you have never seen before, you gotta fall for this one, and for its very cool logo. The kanji used for this logo is the chinese character for “One” (among other meanings), and if you look carefully, you will notice that it has a little (TM) attached to it. Hajime iced green tea has trademarked the word “ONE”, how smart!

Who else than a big US corporation could have done that? Don’t look very far, Coca Cola has been successfully making Tea and coffee in Japan for years, and they have just released “the ONE”… :)
In fact, although it is the same kanji, the word “Hajime” doesn’t mean “one” here, but rather, the “first”. Because, as it states on the ad, this tea is the first green tea, the one that tea harvesters like to drink the most. The freshest, newest, greenest tea in other words. The one that tea people like, and therefore the one that Coca Cola think you will like the most.

According to my Japanese sources, it tastes just like any other green tea on the market.

But the logo is cool…