Aojiru is a Japanese vegetable drink most commonly made from kale. The drink is also known as green drink or green juice in English, a direct translation of the Japanese meaning. (In modern Japanese, the character ao means "blue", but it is commonly still used in older contexts to refer to green vegetation.)

Aojiru was developed in October 1943 by Dr. Niro Endo , an army doctor who experimented with juices extracted from the discarded leaves of various vegetables in an attempt to supplement his family's meager wartime diet. He credited the cure of his son from pneumonia and of his wife from nephritis to aojiru, and in 1949 concluded that kale was the best ingredient for his juice.

Aojiru was popularized in 1983 by Q'SAI , who started marketing 100% kale aojiru in powdered form as a dietary supplement, and sales boomed after 2000 when cosmetics giant Fancl started mass retailing of the juice.Today, many Japanese companies manufacture aojiru, usually using kale, young barley or komatsuna leaves as the base of the drink, and the size of the aojiru market was well over $500 million in 2005.

Why has aojiru reached this extraordinary level of popularity in Japan? Not only does it contain the highly nutritious elements found in kale (including some 40 vitamins, minerals, and other nutrients), but these nutrients exist in almost perfect balance. With new medical evidence demonstrating the positive effects of drinking raw kale juice on a daily basis, aojiru has been dubbed a miracle drink.

The taste of aojiru is famously unpleasant, so much so that drinking a glass of the liquid is a common punishment on Japanese TV game shows. However, new formulations of aojiru have attempted to minimize the bitter taste of the original.

Source : http://en.wikipedia.org