Partying like a Japanese Businessman

As mentioned earlier, I made plans to hangout with a couple of Businessmen (“Salary men”) last Thursday evening. We all met up at the train station around 9pm and headed over to an Izakaya (a “restaurant for drinking” or maybe “bar with food”). The older guy, Genjiro, was 31 and the younger guy (I kept forgetting his name, so I’ll just call him “Downstairs” because that’s what I call him in my address book, since he lives below me in the apartment). Downstairs was probably around 25.

Genjiro orders three beers, a decanter of wine, and two BOTTLES of sake to get things started. He gets an Octopus and wasabi dish, followed by some deep-fried cartilage (I’m NOT making this up). We settle in and it takes them a little while to find my level of Japanese, but since they don’t speak any English, I was very excited for the opportunity to really test my abilities.

We talked about many different things—one funny moment was Genjiro wouldn’t let Downstairs order a specific dish (okonomiyaki—this griddle made with seafood) because the restaurant on served “Osaka” style and Genjiro was from Hiroshima. Funny stuff like that happened all evening.

Luckily for me, I had all my Japanese film knowledge on hand, and it made for some good things to talk about. Half the time though, we spent trying the figure out the titles of the movies I had watched (I knew their English titles, but very rarely were the Japanese titles even similar).

We ordered more cups of Sake from different regions of Japan. The drink menu was basically a large map, with certain sections highlighting the different areas of Japan. After ordering a few different types, Genjiro asked me to order the next round. He handed me the menu and told me to “read it over”. Well this was much easier said than done—all the Kanji were city names and I really didn’t feel like straining to try to understand their subtle differences—I ended up just randomly pointing and it turned out I picked a very strong style. I was the only one who could drink it, so I ended up drinking the whole round. It was one of those nights.

“Downstairs” wasn’t a very strong drinker, but Genjiro looked more like a sumo than the typical skinny Japanese man, so he could hold his liquor very well. As the night winded down, Genjiro orders another BOTTLE of sake, this one was maybe the size of narrow wine bottle, much larger than the other ones.

We all ended up having a great time and didn’t leave the restaurant until after 2 in the morning. We all expressed interest in doing it again in the future, and I know it will be really good for me to do it.

The next day came as a larger surprise than it should have. Apparently drinking until after 2 in the morning and having work the next day don’t exactly go hand in hand. I got a wake up call from Genjiro around 9am (that’s when I’m usually catching the train) so I got up and got ready for work.

I had a terrible ride on the train that morning—a combination of the crowd, the rocking, and the humidity really didn’t do anything to ease my hangover. I went to a convenience store and bought a huge plate of soba noodles. No sauce, no topping, just noodles. After eating that I felt a lot better.

The first two hours of work were pretty tough, but I woke up/felt better around lunch time. Overall it was worth it for the experience—if I do it again, I’ll make sure I don’t have work the next day. It’s pretty cool to know I just rocked out like “Salaryman”.