It’s almost a week since we arrived in Tokyo on our mission to investigate the molecular hydrogen phenomena.
Those of you who have been following this blog would already be aware that we have developed the UltraStream, the world’s first validated non electric water filter and hydrogen producer, and that it has tested better than the most expensive electric system on the market. We knew that there was more to learn and we knew that japan was the place H2 was ‘happening’.
Along the way, we also wanted to check out some of the sales supporting stories we have all heard over the years and see if they were true.
Firstly, we wanted to see if,a s we have been told, alkaline ionized water was available ‘everywhere’.
We looked in the many 7-11’s. We looked in supermarkets, drugstores and in the myriad slot machine drink dispensers and the closest we came to alkaline water was a bottle called ‘Pocari Sweat”. Assured by Western colleagues that this was indeed the ionized water that was Kirin Brewery’s success story, we dropped some yen in the slot and took a bottle back to the hotel. The first swig revealed the awful truth. It was sugar laden; a real ‘kiddy drink’, yet this is supposed to be the most popular water based drink in Japan. A quick Google search revealed that although it has alkaline electrolytes of sodium potassium magnesium and calcium it is NOT ionized.
Our second commonly held assumption was that there are ionized water machines in many supermarkets. When I posted on my Facebook page that we couldn’t find one anywhere, an indignant respondent from Enagic sent an image of one somewhere in Japan, accusing me of malicious intent, whatever that means. Well, our truth is that we couldn’t find one dispenser.
We also believed that if, as is so often quoted, one home in 5 in Japan has a water ionizer, (and there are 18 companies selling them) there should be evidence of them in large department or whitegoods stores. Surely if one in 5 homes have one, they have gotten to the realm of mass merchandising, which would mean normal retail?
Again, nothing. Even stores selling water filters had no ionizers (unlike Taiwan which has stacks of them in stores) so in the absence of actually knocking on doors of private residences, I have no supportive evidence of the 1 in 5 claim.
We had some great discussions with industry leaders, one of whom gave us some good data on actual sales. They sold 100 units per day. That’s 36500 per year. They have 60% of the market, so this in my reckoning equals around 600,000 per year. Now at around 128,000,000, and an average family size (let’s be generous and say 4 people per home) that equals 32 million homes. If there is an ionizer in every 5th home, that means there are 6,400,000 ionizers installed in Japan. At present sales rates, this would take ten years to fill the demand. So.. is it true? I don’t know.
We are committing AlkaWay to finding, testing, developing and offering any way that allows our customers to access molecular hydrogen, and we’ve brought home not just a lot of knowledge but also some interesting technologies we’ll be testing out immediately. Times have changed and we are changing with them.