Right, grab yourself a nice cold coca-cola, sit down and have a good read!
Back in March 2020, I was thrilled to find my first truly old bottle on the beach. With all the crazy storms we get around here, and all of the sea glass they produce, I'm guessing these bottles don't stay in one piece for long
So I felt extremely blessed that one of the first bottles I found was a coca-cola bottle! This naturally led me down the path of researching on Coca Cola bottles here in Japan.
Here are some of my findings: Coca-Cola was first brought to Japan by the U.S. military after the second world-war in 1945. But it wasn't until 1956 that Coca-Cola started to be sold in Japan.
Pictured to the left is a 1000ml / 1 Liter bottle from 1975. It was the first bottle to be sold in this (new for the time) "1 Liter" size. 1 Liter bottles continued to be produced during the rest of the Showa Period (1926-1989), but the "1000ml" underneath the trademark was later removed. Coca-Cola is written in English on one side and Katakana (Japanese characters primarily used for words of foreign origin) on the other side. There are also older bottles where it is only written in katakana on both sides.
The 500ml bottle, pictured on the right is from 1972 - I found this at an antique shop. It was the last bottle to be manufactured in this style before they introduced the red label. The stars next to the 500ml help identify that it was from 1972.
Now Coca-Cola has almost entirely replaced the glass with plastic bottles. And coda-cola can be found on virtually every street corner via their vending machines or convenience stores.
And of course there has been weird flavors like 2020's new release "Orange Vanilla", along with previous years like green tea as well as "innovative" products like Coca-Cola Clear (lemony tasting drink which has zero color as well as zero calories), and Coca-Cola Plus (launched in 2017 with five grams/0.2oz of added dietary fiber).
P.S. I will be placing one empty vintage Japanese Coca-Cola bottle in the shop. Use the coupon "cocacola" for a 20% discount!