along, talking loudly, and she kept telling me how good it felt to be so drunk. [Later] Mrs Hayashi stopped by completely drunk, saying how sorry she was that she had not left the party when I did. Her husband will be angry at her at being kept waiting, she said, but she does love to drink, and just could not tear herself away any sooner. She was sure her husband will divorce her, she laughed, for coming home late and drunk again. Today the women were discussing the Kawaze women’s escapade of the night before (which we don’t learn more of) and how drunk they were and where they finally went for their after-party.”
This all comes from a description of peasant life in southern Kyūshū in the 1930s. Middle-class city dwellers at the time and farmers in other parts of Japan may have had quite different norms (at one stage, Wiswell quotes a school principal’s wife from outside the village finding the antics of the village women “quite surprising”). It was certainly perfectly normal for respectable women in post-war Japan to largely abstain from drinking, and we are currently in the grip of a moral panic about younger women who like to drink. There were, and still are, all sorts of drinking cultures in the country. Today, if you look at a map of Japan’s alcohol consumption, you will find the people of Kyūshū (including Suye village) drink nearly twice as much shōchū per person per year as the rest of the Japan and four times more than parts of Kansai. The heartland of sake is the center and north of the main island. In Niigata prefecture, they drink about 16 liters of sake a year, while in Okinawa and Kagoshima in Kyūshū, they drink about a liter. The same goes for other alcohols: Northerners like whisky, Kyōto and Ōsaka are big on liqueurs, Yamanashi likes its wine. Two prefectures, Tōkyō and Hokkaido, drink just about everything to excess. Perhaps the only generalization that it is possible to make is that, wherever you travel in Japan, you are in the midst of a complex and deeply rooted drinking culture. There are new things to be discovered at every turn.
Sakamukae
Traditionally, when a traveler was expected back from a long pilgrimage, friends and family would wait at an incline at the border of their village to welcome him home. It was customary at these sakamukae to drink sake while waiting. An early Edo-period account has it that one fellow got a little too drunk waiting for an unpunctual friend. He began groaning loudly and his worried friends told him to stop drinking. “What are you talking about?” he said. “I am groaning because the intoxication will go away so soon.”
Detail showing revelers from “A willow tree by the gateway of Shimabara” by Ando Hiroshige (1797–1858).
The Main Types of Drinking Establishments
The first and perhaps the biggest obstacle to exploring Japan’s drinking districts is just getting through the right doors. The best bars are not always the ones that you can see into from the street, and it takes a bit of courage to dive into an unfamiliar establishment with no clear idea of what it sells and how much it charges. Here is a bestiary of the most common types of pubs and bars and some tips on how to identify them.
Izakaya 居酒屋
The three most useful Japanese characters for anybody going drinking in Japan are 居酒屋 for izakaya. The word is probably best translated as “Japanese pub.”
Historically, izakaya seem to have evolved in the 18th century out of alcohol shops that began to sell food and provide seating to customers who wanted to drink on the premises, but nowadays there is as much diversity among izakaya as there is among Western pubs. Some izakaya are very friendly, some are not; many are cheap, but others are trendily expensive. A few are just grim. In general, though, a sign for an izakaya fairly reliably indicates a shop where the main business is food and drink, rather than, say, female friendship (see below). There is usually an entrance charge, but it is often relatively low compared to the more exclusive bars (see page 26).
You will be expected to order a little food to go with your drink. Many of the dishes on the menu will be small otsumami intended to be eaten while drinking. Here are some fairly standard options:
Edamame (boiled soy beans in the pod). A tasty, cheap and commonly available snack.
Yakitori (grilled skewered chicken).
Hiyayakko (cold, fresh tofu). This often comes with fish flakes, so the edamame are a more reliable vegetarian option.
Shiokara (fermented seafoods). A lot more challenging than the previous three options, but a classic Japanese drinking food nonetheless
Izakaya will often have a red lantern outside called an akachōchin. Unfortu-nately, not all shops that have red lanterns are izakaya, so it is good to be able to recognize the Japanese characters.
Other pub-like establishments
There are a number of other Japanese words that are either used interchangeably with izakaya or are very close in meaning to it. The situation is similar to the overlapping meanings of ”pub,” “bar,” “inn” and “tavern” in English. Sometimes izakaya-like establishments will sign themselves as 酒場 (sakaba or “alcohol place”) or 飲み屋 (nomiya or “drinking shop”), which is sometimes written as 呑み屋). The words sakaba and nomiya seem to have slightly wider ranges of meaning than izakaya, encompassing bars without the food menu you would expect in an izakaya, but there is no reliable distinction.
The Kanayama Johnny shōchū bar in Hiroshima (page 95) allows customers to serve themselves from the hundreds of bottles lining the walls. Waitress Asaka Kōno, shown here, says dishonesty is rare.
There is another sub-set of Japanese pubs describing themselves as立ち飲み屋 (tachinomiya or “standing drinking shop”) or スタン丁 イングノ乂—(sutandingu bar or “standing bar”). These places, as their names suggest, serve drinks to standing customers. The English and Japanese versions of the name are applied fairly indiscriminately, although more modern-styled places, serving wines and posh sakes, are more likely to be sutandingu bars while traditional drinking stands tracing their roots back to the post-war years are more likely to be tachinomi.
Pubs パブ
When I first arrived in Japan, I used to walk around looking for “pubs” on the theory that I knew what they were. It is not as simple as that. In Japan, the word “pub” can refer to various types of drinking establishments, not all of which serve reasonably priced drinks. There are “English pubs” and “Irish pubs” offering exactly what you might expect, but there are also “sexy pubs” that sell something else. All sorts of legitimate izakaya, bars and “snacks” also use the word. It is usually obvious when you are dealing with a legitimate drinking establishment but the general advice is not to regard the word “pub” as a guarantee of something familiar.
The English used on Japanese bar signs does not always carry the same meaning it would back home. Clockwise from top left: an “emotional bar” in Takadanobaba, Tōkyō; a “snack” in Toshima, Tōkyō; a “sexy pub” in Shinjuku, Tōkyō; and a jazz bar in Setagaya, Tōkyō.
Bars バー
The word “bar” has as many meanings as “pub.” Many of the places featured in this guide call themselves “bars” but there are also hostess bars and snacks that go under the name. There is so much variation that any
