When Japanese television wants to interview salarymen, it usually goes to the SL Square at the Hibiya exit of Shinbashi Station. The transport news site Traffic News explains why. Slightly drunk after work, the salarymen interviewed there tend to say what they really think, including their everyday complaints. The site suggests that this makes the square ideal for program makers.
Teahouse Politics
Machiai seiji (待合政治): teahouse politics. The Heibonsha World Encyclopedia notes that politicians and political merchants used machiai, teahouses for entertaining, so much that the term was coined.
In an interview with President Online, Oharu, the 84-year-old owner of a bar in Akasaka, recalled that in the Shōwa era Akasaka was a town of ryōtei, exclusive restaurants. Each faction of the Liberal Democratic Party had its fixed ryōtei. The Tanaka faction went to Chiyoshin, the Nakasone faction to Nasu. Of these ryōtei, she said: Zenbu naku narimashita. “They are all gone.”
Golf with Clients
In 2019, Golf Digest Online surveyed 500 employees in their twenties to fifties who play golf at least three or four times a year. 26.4 percent said that they often played with people from client companies. The magazine Serai, which reported the survey, concluded that many people play settai golf, golf to entertain business partners.
Smoking Room Talk
Tabakomyunikēshon: tobacco communication, the talk among smokers at work. In 2015, Mynavi News asked 500 readers whether it could be done away with. 50.2 percent said yes and 49.8 percent said no.
One reader, a 31-year-old man, said: Kantan na uchiawase wa tabako-beya de yattemasu ne. “We hold simple meetings in the smoking room.” A 30-year-old woman said that work moved forward on the basis of conversations and information shared there.
An Autumn Afternoon
In Ozu Yasujirō’s film Sanma no aji (An Autumn Afternoon), released by Shochiku in 1962, old classmates gather at a ryōtei. Their invited guest, Sakuma, nicknamed Hyōtan, the Gourd, eats and drinks heartily.
Later, Sakamoto takes Hirayama to the bar Izumi. Over drinks he asks why Japan lost the war, and he tells how hard things were for him after the war and how he married off his two daughters.
Golf at Burning Tree
In June 1957, Prime Minister Kishi Nobusuke played golf with President Eisenhower at the Burning Tree club in Bethesda. On January 19, 2020, the sixtieth anniversary of the signing of the security treaty, his grandson, Prime Minister Abe Shinzō, spoke of “the friendship that Eisenhower and Kishi cultivated at Burning Tree.”
In the same speech, Abe said that Kishi was the first Japanese prime minister to play golf with an American president. He added that he himself had played golf with President Trump four times, and that the scores were to be kept a state secret.
Drinking with the Boss
Two surveys point in different directions on whether young Japanese employees still want to drink with their colleagues and bosses. In a December 2025 survey of 360 company employees, 66.5 percent of those in their twenties said that they wanted to join such nomikai, drinking parties, or would join when needed.
In a survey of Generation Z by SHIBUYA109 lab., cited by the NLI Research Institute, 66.7 percent said that they were not fond of company drinking parties that include bosses. The report does not give the year of that survey.
Party Without Rank
A bureikō is a banquet held without regard to rank or etiquette. The most famous one in Japanese history was held by Emperor Go-Daigo in the Kamakura period. He used it to gather people of different ranks and plot in secret. One guest told his wife, and the plot leaked.
The same source notes that, in practice, rank does not disappear at a bureikō. Communication at company drinking parties has its own coined word, nominication, from nomu (to drink). It first appeared in the media in the 1980s.