The business has four main players: the drink manufacturers, the vending machine makers, independent owners and landlords, who get a cut of proceeds from a machine placed on their property.

And while recent trends have seen vending machine sales of mineral water skyrocket, clearly the most popular beverage being sold on the streets is canned coffee.

"Nowhere on earth is canned coffee consumed the way it is in Japan. And what's more, the market is dominated by only a very few brands, like Boss, Georgia and Wonder," the sales manager from a medium-sized beverage manufacturer tells Weekly Playboy. "It's no exaggeration to say that one hit product can bring in 10 billion yen, and a hit brand can make 100 billion yen. It's little wonder that the beverage companies go all out to develop new products and try their hardest to come up with something that's going to appeal to people."

There have been signs of closer cooperation in the market in recent years, with major makers tying up with smaller companies to fill their machines with boutique products they don't have in their own lines. But generally, the vending machine market is a fierce battlefield, where the devil takes the hindmost.

As anybody who's ever walked along a Japanese street can tell, vending machines are everywhere, and finding a new place to put down a machine is a far more competitive task than it appears at first glance.

"There has been incredible competition to increase market share among makers in recent years," Hiroaki Makuta, an analyst with the Yano Research Institute, tells Weekly Playboy. "The best spots have tended to go to the companies with the most money, and there has been a tendency for location owners to be paid more and get bigger commissions for letting the vending machines be set up."

Complicating the space battle is the growing government opposition to vending machines in a crowded country where space has always been at a premium, let alone considering the impact the automated sales outlets have on the environment. That has made the spate of major shopping mall construction a favorite target of vending machine makers as they seek to set up indoors rather than out, where regulations are becoming tighter.

"In a major shopping center, you can probably set up about 50 vending machines. Normally, the retailers' association inside the centers will decide what maker can set up their machines, how many they can put in and what sort of products they will allow, so it's not rare to hear of the manufacturers plying representatives of these organizations with lavish entertainment or the promise of extremely high margins. I'd say the retailers stand to make a pretty packet," a vending machine product salesman tells the weekly. "Normally, with these big places, there are supposed to be public tenders where every bid is treated fairly and on its merits, but the reality is often that these races are won well before they've even taken place."

And the powerful beverage companies able to cop losses in some places so they can rack in the cash in others make it hard for independent vending machine owners.

"Monthly sales for operating a single vending machine are probably in the vicinity of 100,000 yen. With costs, you're looking about 70,000 yen to stock products, another 10,000 yen to the property owner for putting the machine on their land, another 5,000 yen for electricity and then 10,000 yen to lease the machine from its owner. That leaves you with about 5,000 yen, but then you've still got to think about the labor costs involved in going out and filling the machine up, too. I'd say more than half the vending machines in the country are probably operating at a loss," the head of a major beverage manufacturer's branch office says. "But people do it in the hope they'll get their hands on a super vending machine. These are the machines that can really rake it in. Take the vending machines at the park in Osaka's Amerika-mura, which are said to reap in about 2 million yen a month each. And, if you can get a vending machine at a major train station in the countryside, it could easily bring in 500,000 yen a month for you with ease."

With so much money at stake and so many companies fighting to get their hands on it, there's little room for niceties in Japan's vending machine market.

"You often hear horrible stories of people going around to competitors' machines and filling the coin slots with superglue so they can't be used, or even peeing in the slots where the products come out to destroy the rival's reputation. These sorts of cases are extremely rare, though," the vending machine product salesman tells Weekly Playboy. "I get the feeling that we've just about reached saturation point as far as places to install vending machines goes, though. The only option is to fight to increase your market share. I must admit that since the law has come out ordering the removal of vending machines that protrude out too close to roads, I have anonymously notified authorities about competitors' machines that stick out too far and then gone on made offers to property owners to set up some of my company's 'super-thin' vending machines in their place." (By Ryann Connell)