Just four days after Aung San Suu Kyi’s civilian government was toppled, the Japanese brewer Kirin decided to quit a joint venture with ties to the country’s military.
The conclusion, reached at an emergency meeting, was swift and unanimous. “It was no longer tenable. I had to make a decision fast,” said Yoshinori Isozaki, chief executive of Kirin, one of Myanmar’s largest foreign investors.
With huge crowds of protesters on the streets and Myanmar’s future in question, the coup has presented a moral and practical crisis to the hundreds of Japanese companies that have invested nearly $2bn since the country’s democratic transition began in 2011, hoping to capture growth from one of the last frontier markets in Asia.