It’s a familiar scene for Tokyoites. On a Friday night in a Shibuya convenience store, with the line several people deep and the bathrooms “out of order,” the person ahead of you clutches just two items: one shiny can of alcohol and one small brass-colored bottle. You yourself may be stepping up to the register with the very same items in a moment, a long night of drinking ahead of you. This is perhaps Japan’s most well known pre-socializing ritual: The hangover drink konbini run.
Over the past several years a nascent market for pills and patches have cropped up in the U.S. promising relief from the thick dragon’s breath of the hangover. Wrapped in wellness marketing, these products promise to help the body metabolize alcohol faster and spare you from the worst in the morning.
But in Japan, hangover remedies aren’t a new fad. They don’t need to rely on sleek minimalist branding or claim to be backed by science. Shijimi clams, miso soup and umeboshi (pickled plums) are old home remedies, but they don’t have their own shelves in every convenience store, drug store and supermarket. Hangover cures are everywhere in Japan, generating an estimated $397.7 million (¥52.1 billion) in revenue in 2022 and making up about 20% of the world’s hangover remedy market.
“I felt much better than expected for the amount I drank,” a friend told me recently after trying one for the first time before a long night of revelry, which included a cake competition. “But normally I don’t also have copious amounts of cake,” he added.
Another skeptical friend downed a tiny bottle before moving her way through a night of beer, wine, sake, shōchū and gin, and a considerable dose of karaoke; the next day she observed of her relatively healthful state: “I’m not a believer, but I saw Jesus.”
I have a friend who swears by his hangover pills, saying he feels like he can run a marathon the morning after, and another who buys his pills in sets of 360, enough for 60 hangovers.
Here in Japan, we spend on them, stockpile them, line up for them — but do any of these hangover cures work?
To the afterparty!
The two most recognizable brands on the hangover relief shelf are Hepalyse, known for its white label with a cartoon pink liver, and the brassy aluminum bottled Ukon no Chikara.
Hepalyse tablets were first released in 1968 by Zeria Pharmaceuticals as a drug that improved liver function for people with hepatitis and cirrhosis, its name a portmanteau of “hepar,” the Greek word for “liver,” and the English “-lysis,” as in, “to break down.” In 1994, the company introduced Hepalyse Drink, with the now ubiquitous liver logo. The cocktail of ingredients, primarily extracts of pork liver and turmeric, tastes deep and sweet like a retro candy, with a light battery acid finish.
Ukon no Chikara, which means “the power of turmeric,” and which tastes medicinally sweet, like a can of Redbull that’s been left open for a few hours, debuted from House Foods in 2004. Among other things, the drink contains aki ukon (autumn turmeric), which is high in curcumin, a compound used throughout Asia for its anti-inflammatory and antioxidant properties.
The market is growing: For the year ending in March 2024, sales from Zeria’s Hepalyse products were nearly ¥11 billion ($72.6 million), more than double what it was in 2013, although sales have yet to return to pre-COVID-19 levels.
Hepalyse commercials show salarymen and women gleefully slugging the drink in the streets and in pubs, while dancing “Swan Lake” and belting out Mozart. In other ads, people shuffle through the night to the voiceover, “To the year-end party — Ukon! — To the after party — Ukon!” Ukon also uses the slogan “kanpai ni kiku,” or “effective for toasting.”
There is just one vexing point in all this, though. Search the labels and you won’t find any mentions of “alcohol” or “futsukayoi,” the Japanese word for “hangover.”
Even the suggestion of a connection is an invitation to have doors slammed in your face.
“Hepalyse is a nutritional supplement,” a Zeria press representative tells me. “We can’t speak about its effectiveness against hangovers.”
“Ukon no Chikara is sold as a food product, so we cannot claim any specific effects or benefits,” says a public relations rep for House Foods.
For its part, Japan’s Consumer Affairs Agency also has nothing to say about the efficacy of these hangover drinks — because they are ostensibly not hangover drinks. A representative from the agency echoes that these drinks are nutritional supplements — while also pointing out that this is not an existing agency-designated label but one added by food corporations.
(There are a few lesser known exceptions. Kowa’s Eki Cab Kowa A, for example, is a quasi-drug targeted at overeating and nausea from hangovers. Containing multiple plant extracts for “stomach health,” it comes with a forest green label and tastes like the dentist’s office. A cloying and bitter yellow-labeled drink called Taisho Kanpo Gastrointestinal Medicine, whose name nods to traditional Chinese medicine, is marketed for excessive drinking and hangover nausea.)
The ads are clear — Don’t drink without our product and If you take this product, you can drink till morning — even if the labels are not. But there’s a simple reason the companies don’t speak plainly: As far as the science is concerned, there’s no such thing as a hangover cure.
In fact it’s a brilliant loophole; the brands never have to address whether their drinks work for hangovers, because they never claim they do.
To each their own misery
“Although there are many hangover products marketed, there is no convincing scientific evidence that these treatments are effective,” says Joris C. Verster, associate professor of pharmacology at Utrecht University in the Netherlands and founder of the Alcohol Hangover Research Group.
The only effective way to prevent a hangover, experts say, is to drink alcohol in moderation (which sounds about as fun as abstinence-only birth control).
Hangovers are complicated beasts that start to circle overhead when the body’s blood alcohol concentration nears zero. They’re highly variable between and within people, and involve a wide range of symptoms, including sensitivity to light and sound, anxiety, confusion, sweatiness, thirst, nausea and ennui.
In recent conversations, I’ve heard reports of “generalized regret,” “existential hangover,” “immobility until 6 p.m.,” inability to keep any water down, and the all-familiar “Everything is awful” — (brain? stomach? heart? soul?) — “Just. Everything.” During my own worst hangovers, in which I feel like the world’s most exhausted sponge, I imagine my brain’s neurons beginning to fire and then simply giving up, too strung out to reach their potential.
Hangovers are hard to study in part because of the way we drink. Symptoms associated with drinking seven G&Ts may be exacerbated by other behavior that comes with tossing back gin: not drinking enough water, eating food that irritates the stomach, smoking cigarettes, going to bed later than usual and getting poor sleep, among many other unwise choices.
Although they’re thought to be caused by dehydration and inflammation and oxidative stress from consuming alcohol, the surprising truth is that hangovers are understudied, and experts don’t fully understand what causes them. Without a solid grasp of pathology, it seems unlikely we’ll see hangovers effectively treated.
Research does exist on alcohol metabolization in mice. But studying hangovers in the real world would require double-blind, placebo-controlled clinical trials in social drinkers — that is, human ones.
It can’t hurt, right?
What’s more, medical experts are not actually incentivized to find a remedy, says hepatologist, gastroenterologist and medical doctor Shinichi Asabe. He’s also the main doctor in question in the book “Sakezuki Ishi ga Oshieru Saiko no Nomikata,” or “Sake-loving doctors teach us the best way to drink,” by journalist Kaori Haishi.
His medical recommendation is not to seek ways to relieve hangover symptoms — it’s to drink less.
Asabe is skeptical of the Japanese supplements and thinks there may be some degree of placebo effect at work. The drinks do contain vitamins thought to help with liver function, he says, so bolstering them probably doesn’t hurt — but they won’t significantly affect people who already have enough of these vitamins in their diet. Turmeric, because it has anti-inflammatory effects, may help lighten some hangover symptoms, he says, but they don’t prevent them or address the root cause.
The assumption that “it can’t hurt,” Asabe says, seems to fuel the market for hangover cures. (Though in fact, new reports show that high doses of curcumins can actually lead to liver damage.) Asabe admits that he himself occasionally takes Kewpie’s Yoi Toki One, which doesn’t contain turmeric or liver extract; rather, Asabe says, the acetic acid bacteria have a similar effect on the liver as if you had a bit less to drink to begin with.
Ultimately, says Asabe, the quest for a cure for the common hangover has been a commercial venture, much more than a scientific one.
Oriental raisin cures
Hangover prevention is certainly big business in East Asia more broadly, where drinking is seen as an important part of maintaining professional relationships. Japan’s year-end bōnenkai, new year shinnenkai and spring cherry blossom party seasons all invariably include several stages of drinking with colleagues, sometimes culminating in a crowded karaoke session, which explains why the ads for these definitely-not-for-hangover drinks feature so many office workers.
In South Korea’s hangover cure market, which was valued at $285 million in 2022, the Condition drink and its popular jelly version have led the pack. Condition is explicitly sold for hangovers and uses dihydromyricetin, which comes from the oriental raisin tree and has been shown by researchers to reduce the negative effects of alcohol in mice.
This is the same main ingredient used by Singapore-based supplement bback (as well as an intriguing Korean hangover ice cream bar.) CEO and co-founder Roy Ang was running the financial division of Grab, Southeast Asia’s main ride-sharing app, and having to stay out late entertaining partners, when one night he was given a bottle of Ukon no Chikara by a Japanese investor.
In 2021, Ang launched a large white capsule with a distinctly sandy aftertaste (and 3,000% of your daily copper), sold as Hangly in the US and UK. But now Ang is realizing that, like in Japan, using the word “hangover” in marketing is both tricky and limiting, and the company is rebranding and expanding into other wellness supplements. Plus, he adds, he doesn’t want to give people an excuse to binge drink.
Calculated risk
“As long as alcohol is consumed, drinkers suffer from hangovers,” says Verster. That’s why the most effective advice against a hangover is not what products you add but what alcohol you can subtract. The common advice to drink one glass of water for every drink, for example, helps with hydration but also slows down the pace of booze consumed.
Calculating personal limits of actual alcohol intake is key. That’s the reasoning behind the advice not to mix different types of alcohol. The risk is not, as commonly believed, from the combination; rather, it’s harder to track your own intake if you drink a 5% alcoholic beer followed by a shot of 50% whisky rounded out by a choko (cup) of 18% sake.
The problem is that most people want to relax and forget their problems for the night, not do math.
But trends signal a larger shift worldwide. Even in a virtually drug-free society like Japan, younger generations are drinking less alcohol. Asabe says young people are beginning to question the “taipa,” or “time performance” (a play on “kosupa,” or “cost performance”), of “nomunication,” a word for workplace bonding over booze. They don’t see alcohol as an efficient form of fun.
For every few hours of drinking, you pay in a whole day of fog and remorse — with no known cure other than the tonic of time.
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