This is not true. If you go to Japan you will see an army of extremely drunk salarymen every night, and statistically Japanese people do consume a ton of alcohol compared to most western countries.
As someone who is living in Japan, I would say that Japanese drank less than Europeans for sure. Europeans will drink a couple of glasses of wine every night for example.
> Europeans will drink a couple of glasses of wine every night for example.
I'm from a wine-producing region in Europe and I would not consider this normal in any way. Not even my parents drink that much, and they have a dedicated wine cellar.
While this source seems to have valid numbers for wine consumption (based on the 2016 numbers available on Wikipedia), but the jump from liters per year to glasses per day is not coherent at all.
60 liters per year =
1.15 liters per week =
164ml per day
That is a not 2-3 glasses nor the "couple of glasses" I was calling out - that is what I would describe as "one generous glass" or ~1.3 UK standard wine glasses of 125ml.
I only visited Tokyo. That's like saying I know the US, because I've visited New York. I did go, every year (sometimes multiple times per year), for over twenty years.
I also live in Japan currently and I find the drinking culture to be weak. I've met a few people who drink daily but they tend to come from other parts of Asia (Korea etc...) where drinking is very common. This article might be alluding to a age difference considering I am in my early twenties.