Customers at the Daizen sake bar, Chiyoda, Tōkyō.
The folk religion Shinto and indeed much of the fabric of traditional Japan incorporates alcohol consumption at almost every turn: the most sacred part of a Shinto wedding is the san-san-kudo, where the couple ceremonially drink alcohol to bind themselves in matrimony; the Girl’s Festival in March is toasted with the sweet, low-alcohol amazake (March was a prime time for home brewing when arrests were still common because the booze could always be excused as amazake gone bad); the coming of the cherry blossom brings hanami picnics celebrating spring with enthusiastic drinking; in autumn, full moon viewing parties are also soused and the New Year celebrations are incomplete in many families without toso, a herb-infused sake thought to guarantee health in the coming months.
The details of these traditions vary widely between different localities but a common feature is that the consumption of the alcohol often seems to be as important as the excuse for it. The American scholars Robert Smith and Ella Wiswell, describing 1930s rural society in Suye village, Kumamoto prefecture, quoted a Mrs Toyama, who was organizing a cherry blossom party: “It is called hanami (flower viewing) but, since the cherry blossoms are gone, we will look at the violets in the fields instead.”
Smith and Wiswell were astonished by the Bacchanalian energy of the Japanese farmers they studied: “The people of Suye were always ready for a party, and one cannot but be impressed by their seemingly limitless capacity to find occasions for them. Most parties, whether attended by both women and men, or by men or women only, involved dancing, singing, eating, and heavy drinking, and almost invariably considerable sexual joking and play. There were parties given to mark the naming of a new baby, returning from a visit to a shrine or temple, celebrating a variety of festivals and holidays, sending off conscripts and welcoming them back, dedicating new buildings and marking the end of rice planting and the harvest, the completion of the silk-producing cycle, and every other enterprise involving more than two or three people.”
An Encouragement of Learning
The statesman and scholar Yukichi Fukuzawa is chiefly remembered today as the founder of Keio University and for his presence on the 10,000 yen note, but his tremendous energy produced an English–Japanese dictionary, best-selling books on Western culture, influential political and philosophical works, children’s textbooks, a national newspaper and the 17-volume An Encouragement of Learning . His own method of keeping himself at the scholarly grindstone was more carrot than stick: he would put a bottle of sake on top of his oil lamp as he studied. By the time the sake had warmed up, it would be midnight and he would relax with a drink of the hot sake before retiring to bed.
On one occasion, Wiswell attended a “vaccination day” at a school: “Mothers came from all directions, and the school room looked like a nursery with babies crawling all over the place.... When I left all the older children had got their vaccinations and the doctor was well through the babies. On my way down the stairs I met the custodian with a barrel of shōchū and bottles of beer. ‘The drinking is starting,’ he said. It had not occurred to me, after all these months, that even a vaccination clinic calls for drinking afterwards.”
Alcohol was a part of life for almost all adults. If anybody tells you that Japanese drinking was traditionally only for the men, ask them to explain this account by Wiswell of a “baby naming party” in Kumamoto: “Everyone got very drunk. The old grandmother became very playful with Masakichi, and Ichiro’s father was pawing one of his sisters-in-law. Mrs Wauchi was very far gone, and the two of us must have made a funny sight coming home huddled under her shawl, as I was without a coat. We stumbled 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.