Izakaya, early evening. You've ordered edamame and want something cold and fizzy to go with it. "Saidaa, kudasai," you say, quietly pleased with your pronunciation.
The waiter nods and comes back with a small, clear glass bottle — ice-cold, faintly lemon-yellow, and precisely as alcoholic as a can of lemonade, because that is essentially what it is.
You check the label for apples. There are none. There never were.
サイダー is just the katakana spelling of the English word "cider" — but in Japan it has settled on one specific meaning: a clear, lemon-and-lime carbonated soft drink, sweet, fizzy, alcohol-free, and completely appleless. It sits on convenience-store shelves next to cola and green tea as one of the oldest and most ordinary soft-drink categories in the country, the default fizzy thing at festivals, school trips and every summer barbecue.
The word arrived with a drink that owed its existence to a lucky accident. In 1881 the British mining engineer William Gowland examined a mineral spring at Hirano, in what is now Kawanishi, Hyogo, and judged its water excellent; three years later it went on sale as bottled sparkling water called Hirano-sui. In 1907 an imported cider-flavour essence was stirred into the recipe and the drink was relaunched as "Mitsuya-jirushi Hirano Champagne Cider" — simplified in 1952 to the name still on shelves today, Mitsuya Cider. Nobody along that chain was picturing a fermented apple orchard. They were picturing an imported Western flavour, and the word came bundled with the bottle.
This is less a mistranslation than Japan borrowing half of a word English had already split in two. Ask for plain "cider" at an American farm stand in autumn and you'll usually be handed cloudy, unfiltered, entirely non-alcoholic apple juice — "hard cider" is the fermented version, and the adjective does the necessary work. Only in Britain does bare "cider" default to alcohol. Japan picked up the word while the non-alcoholic reading was current in the trade English of the day, and never needed the other half.
What Japan then did with its half is its own story. A cottage industry of small-batch, regional "ji-cider" — often bottled at a single hot-spring town or train station — traces back to a 2002 revival kicked off by Arima Cider, from the old hot-spring resort of Arima Onsen. Since then the flavour list has sprawled well past lemon and grape into curry bread, grilled beef tongue and whatever citrus grows locally, sold in gift shops as a drinkable postcard.
And when Japan eventually needed the actual alcoholic apple drink, it didn't reopen the argument over "cider" — it imported a second word. シードル (shiidoru) comes straight from the French cidre, and now sits on wine-shop shelves for the genuine fermented article, entirely separate from the drink a child orders at a barbecue. Two loanwords, one job each.
English never actually settled what "cider" means — it just quietly lets context and an occasional adjective do the disambiguating, and most English speakers have never noticed the gap. Japan took delivery of the word at a moment when only one of its two meanings was on offer, used it that way for over a century, and then, when it needed the other meaning too, simply imported a fresh word rather than overloading the old one. The result is a language that resolved an ambiguity English speakers still trip over in their own bars — entirely by accident, thanks to a Meiji-era mining engineer and a bottle of flavoured spring water.