less emphasis on food than an izakaya does. The barman or woman is much more likely to be serving from behind a bar top, will probably be offering Western drinks of some description (although there are also sake and shōchū bars), and is likely to be charging a heftier entrance charge than your average izakaya.
“Snack” スナック
The “snack” is a peculiarly Japanese institution. It is typically a small bar run by a woman. Part of the attraction for customers can be the conversation with the mama-san, although, in many places, couples will go to a snack and treat it as their local bar. Originally, snacks emerged out of regulations that forbade hostess bars from opening late at night. Women running snacks could argue that they were doing bar work and not hostessing, which allowed later hours. It is a misunderstanding to see all snacks as sleazy operations. Most are not. However, you are usually paying in some way for the personal attention— either through some sort of entrance charge or a relatively expensive food dish that you are expected to accept. These charges are often higher than in a standard izakaya. A snack is never, as I mistakenly thought on arriving in Japan, a cheap place to go for a bite to eat.
Soba restaurants, oden stalls, etc.
For the Japanese, drinking and eating go together and there are many types of restaurants that are associated with alcohol. Two of the more classic choices are soba restaurants and oden stalls (see page 64). Soba (そば) shops, serving buckwheat noodle dishes, are traditional places for daytime tippling. A glass of sake, shōchū or beer with your noodles is quite the done thing. Drinking too much, though, is seriously uncool. Oden (おでん), an assortment of vegetables, fish cakes and eggs cooked in a light soy-flavored stew, is another time-honored drinking food and the best places to try it are the rickety outdoor stalls set up in some parks. They usually serve cheap sake, shōchū and beer. The modern preference is for drinking with various types of grilled meat. The drinking quarters are full of yakiniku (焼肉 or 焼き肉, grilled meat); horumonyaki (ホソレモン焼き, beef and pork offal); gyūtan (牛タン, grilled beef tongue), Mongolian barbecue (using lamb and mutton and often referred to as Jingisu Kan (ジン 干スカン)), as well as Korean barbecue restaurants.
The law
Drinking age
The minimum legal drinking age in Japan is 20.
Disorderly behavior
The Law to Prevent Drunk and Disorderly Conduct (1961) empowers the Japanese police to arrest people for disorderly speech or behavior in public places.
Drunk driving
Anybody who tells you that Japan is lax on drunk drivers is seriously ill-informed. It now has some of the strictest drunk driving laws in the world. You can be imprisoned or heavily fined not only for drunk driving yourself but for being in a car with a drunk driver, lending a car to someone who has been drinking or serving alcohol to a driver. Enforcement is highly effective: police routinely block roads and test everyone who comes by. You don’t have to be driving irregularly to get caught.
The legal limit is less than .03 blood alcohol content, which is significantly lower than in many countries; one small beer will get some people over that limit. Indeed, one Western executive was taken to court for driving the morning after drinking. The maximum sentence is five years in prison and a fine of 1,000,000 yen. Although the sentences will not be that tough for most drink drivers, it is worth remembering that Japanese law routinely enforces large compensation payments upon people who cause harm to others or damage to property on the road. If you are under the influence, you will almost certainly be judged to be at fault, and that could mean life-ruining debts.
Emergency service telephone numbers
110—Police
119—Ambulance
Kimiko Satō, owner of Juttoku, Shinjuku, Tōkyō (page 58), pours sake for customers.
Pouring for others
It is customary when drinking in a group in Japan to pour other people’s drinks, and it is polite to wait for others in the group to pour yours. This may sound overly formal to the uninitiated, but can be a great way for foreigners having difficulty with the language to interact and make friends. I have known this custom to be used to strike up conversations with people in adjoining groups too. If you want to be really polite, pour while holding the bottle in two hands and hold your glass in two hands when receiving. If possible, try to accept drinks offered by people in the group who have not poured for you and swiftly pick up the bottle and pour for them (in many cases, people are pouring because they want their glass refilled). None of these drinking customs should be taken as being set in stone. Plenty of people pour their own drinks in group situations. In general, it is not the done thing to drink directly from bottles, although there are young people’s hangouts where this is de rigueur. Where a glass is provided, it is best to use it.
Cautionary notes
Drinking too much
Drinking in a new environment has a way of making idiots out of people. Familiar cues that rein in excessive drinking are not present. Bars in Japan, for instance, open very late compared to many pubs in the UK, where I come from. British people often start drinking quite early in the evening, forgo food and drink at a breakneck pace because they are used to pubs closing between 11 and 12 pm. This kind of approach is likely to lead to embarrassment (or worse) in a drinking culture where many bars are still serving drinks at 4 am. The hazards will vary depending where you come from, but it is a good idea to take a conservative approach until you get your bearings.
“Kampai!”
Many Japanese drinking sessions will start with a toast and it is polite not to start gulping until the customary loud chorus of Kampai! Another drinking exclamation is Banzai!, which is far less popular than it once was but is still occasionally heard near the climax of an evening, particularly at company parties. Banzai does not mean that everybody present is about to fix bayonets, as some aficionados of John Wayne films may mistakenly believe. It literally means “10,000 years” and toasts the emperor’s long life (or, indeed, the longevity and prosperity of other, non-Emperor related pursuits).
The use of Kampai and Banzai as drinking toasts appears to be a relatively new phenomenon. Wherever there are drinkers there is always going to be someone who thinks a few words goes well with the first glass (see otōri, page 120) but it was the arrival of Western diplomats in the Meiji period (1868–1912) that formalized Japanese toasts. The foreigners were forever toasting their kings and presidents and so, not to be outdone, the Japanese representatives started shouting alcohol Banzais to the emperor. Later, in the 1910s and 1920s, Kampai! (from the Chinese exhortation Kampei!, “Drain your glass”) began to establish itself as a less Emperor-centric alternative to Banzai!
Another major cause of stomach-heaving futsukayoi (hangovers) is unfamiliarity with the alcohol being consumed. Sake is one of the world’s strongest brewed beverages. Knocking it back like beer will end in disaster. If the clear liquid you have been poured is shōchū, a distilled spirit weighing in at anything from 25 to 40 percent alcohol, you really need to be sipping, not gulping. Even some of the craft beer bars recommended in Chapter 4 can catch you off guard: a 9 percent Special Brown Ale from Hakusekikan, for instance, is a very different beast from a 4.7 percent London Pride.
Japanese drinking customs can sometimes push you into drinking too much. As I mentioned
