Have no friends? Feeling sorry for yourself? Emotionally vulnerable? Never fear! The Japanese brewery Orion have come to the rescue with “Zero Life” – depression in a can.

Orion puts great emphasis on recycling all its waste, producing “zero elimination”. Hence, the marketing intention of “Zero Life” was probably to promote a lifestyle beer produced with zero waste. Instead, what they ended up with was a ‘you have no life you loser so you better start drowning your sorrows’ beer.

Orion is the 5th largest beer brewery in Japan and is headquartered in Okinawa. Although it only has around a 1% market share of the Japanese beer market it controls over 50% of the beer market on Okinawa.

Philanthropist, volunteer worker and resident of Peru, Scott Jeppesen of the charitable organisation Sonrisas en Peru, explores the fascinating history of Japanese immigration to Peru and the strong influence that Japanese culture has played on various aspects of Peruvian society.

I currently reside in Lima, the capital of Peru. Every day I am faced with some characteristic of Peruvian culture that has been derived from Japanese origins. Urged by curiosity I soon discovered the intriguing story of the Japanese Peruvians, a large ethnic immigrant group in Peru.

The Japanese Peruvians

The Japanese Peruvians are Peruvian citizens of Japanese ethnic origin. They constitute around 0.3% of Peru’s population (estimated at nearly 90,000 in 2008) which is the second largest population of people with Japanese ancestry in Latin America after Brazil.

Peru was the first Latin American country to accept Japanese immigration. Back in 1899 the first wave of 790 Japanese immigrants arrived at the Peruvian seaport Callao aboard the “Sakura Maru” from the Japanese port of Yokohama and thus spawned the Nikkei ethnicity in Latin America.

The Sakura Maru

Most notably, Japanese Peruvians were brought to the world’s attention in 1990 by the election of Alberto Fujimori, son of Japanese immigrants and the 90th president of Peru. Fujimori was the first person of Asian descent to become president of a Western country.

Alberto Ken'ya Fujimori