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Coca-Cola “Slim Bottle” City Designs range showcases top tourist spots in Japan

Oona McGee Dec 1, 2017
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Each bottle can only be purchased in the specific tourist spot it was designed for, so tracking down all nine requires a Japanese road trip of epic proportions.

Customers in Japan are used to splurging on their favourite sweets and drinks when they come out in awesome limited-edition flavours, but for soft drink giant Coca-Cola, there’s a different path to generating excitement, and it comes in the form of a unique bottle range called Coca-Cola “Slim Bottle” City Designs.

The iconic red-and-white label is now being joined by some of the most unique designs the world has ever seen, with nine new bottles featuring some of Japan’s most well-known tourist destinations. Five of the designs – Hokkaido, Tokyo, Kyoto, Setouchi, and Kumamoto – first hit the market from June this year, and now, from 20 November, there are another three designs to add to your collection.

Seeing as each bottle is limited for sale only in the area that appears on its design, tracking down all nine is no easy task, but we’ve got the whole range here for you to look at so you can see all the details that went into each of the gorgeous designs.

First up, let’s start at the very northern tip of the country with the Hokkaido design, which was first released in June and can only be purchased in the country’s northernmost prefecture.

The design here features well-known Hokkaido landmarks like the Sapporo Clock Tower, the Sapporo TV Tower, Hakodate’s Goryokaku Tower, and the statue of Dr William Smith Clark, an influential American professor who taught in Hokkaido in the late 1870s.

There’s also an image of the prefecture and a series of beautifully detailed snowflakes, in reference to the area’s renowned snowfall.

Like all the bottles in the range, this one comes with the corresponding tourist spot printed on the back of the product.

Those who visit Japan’s capital city will be able to look out for the Tokyo design, which was also released in June and is limited for sale mainly in the Tokyo area only.

This one shows the famous city skyline, including the iconic Tokyo Tower and what appears to be the Rainbow Bridge and Shinjuku high-rises.

Travelling south, we arrive at the country’s ancient capital of Kyoto, an area steeped in tradition, which is reflected in this beautiful design, which was released in July this year.

Here we see a kimono-clad maiko looking out over an arched bridge and what looks like Daimonji-yama, a Kyoto mountain known for “Gozan Okuribi“, an event where the huge kanji character on the mountainside is set alight to celebrate the end of Obon, the festival of the dead. This design is only available to purchase in the Kansai region of Japan.

Next, we move on to Setouchi, a region that includes the Seto Inland Sea and the coastal areas of Kyushu, Shikoku and Honshu.

This design appears to pay homage to the region’s famous floating torii gate, located at Itsukushima Shrine, and the Seto Ohashi Bridge that connects the mainland with the island of Shikoku over the Seto Inland Sea. This bottle will be limited for sale in the Shikoku and Chugoku regions of Japan.

▼ Rounding off July’s three-piece collection is the Kumamoto design.

It looks like Kumamoto Castle, the city’s most revered structure, which suffered devastating damage following a series of earthquakes in 2016, is at the centre of this design. This design will be available to purchase on the island of Kyushu only.

The next design in the series pays homage to the city of Yokohama, capital of Kanagawa Prefecture (which is located just south of Tokyo).

This area is best known for being a port city with a huge ferris wheel. Home to big ships and plenty of seagulls, this design also appears to show an image of the Yokohama Landmark Tower, which is the second tallest building and the fourth tallest structure in the country, standing at 296.3 metres (972 feet) high.

Now we come to the newest members of the collection, which were just released on 20 November. First up, we have Saitama, which might not be on many itineraries for foreign tourists, but remains a popular place to go for locals, given its proximity to Tokyo as it’s located just a short train ride away from the capital city.

One of Saitama’s most well-known landmarks, the Toki no Kane (“Bell of Time”) clocktower, has a history that dates back to the Edo period (1603-1868). The 16-metre (52-foot) high wooden clocktower stands tall over the historic town of Kawagoe, with its bells still chiming four times a day. This bottle appears to show the clocktower alongside an image of the boat rides at Chichibu’s Nagatoro Line Descent, where boatman manoeuvre their boats with distinctive long poles.

The next newly released bottle pays homage to the city of Nagoya in Aichi Prefecture.

This city has a proud samurai tradition, stemming from the fact that many of Japan’s most powerful feudal lords, including Oda Nobunaga and Tokugawa Ieyasu, were born and raised in Aichi Prefecture. It looks like a sword-weilding samurai and an image of Nagoya Castle, one of the city’s most famous landmarks, is at the centre of this design.

Finally, we have the Ueno design, which can be purchased at outlets around central Ueno in the city of Tokyo.

Ueno Zoo, the country’s oldest zoo, is famous for its mother-and-cub pandas, as this was the first cub born at Ueno Zoo in five years. This cute bottle seems to show the pandas enjoying themselves by Ueno Park’s Shinobazu Pond, which is often depicted in historical works of art.

With the adorable limited-edition bottles being highly sought after, we have a feeling that there’ll be more designs joining the current range soon. What places and designs would you like to see on Coke bottles in the future? Let us know in the comments section below!