Some thoughts on the "enkai"...
Japanese workers don't party like Americans.
Americans socialize at work. Love-life troubles and happy stories of kids' achievements create common ground for coworker bonding. Not in Japan. Japanese strictly separate their home lives from their work lives. Office desks are free of family photos and fishing pictures. Coworker bonding occurs outside work hours, under the influence of good food and copious amounts of alcohol.
Mandatory salary deductions, around thirty-five dollars a month at my office, fund the enkai, office party, account. Heavy drinkers and eaters contribute the same as the less gluttonous. Every couple of months the money comes back out. For a special, or sometimes not-so-special occasion, the entire department heads to a restaurant or bar.
Speeches are followed by the kampai, or toast. Like men deprived of liquid for days, the men guzzle their first beers. Women, sitting in seiza, sip their first drink. More reserved than the men, they probably won't end up drunk. Meanwhile, the men finish their second and third beers, and switch to sake. In between drinks, they pick at piles of food, mumbling slurred Japanese arounds mouthfuls of sashimi and yaki-tori.
The more they drink, the friendlier they get. "Temira, I really like you a lot," slurred one male coworker. "I'm so glad you're in our office. We must be friends forever. Don't forget me when you leave, all right?" His hand rested on my thigh, and he leaned in close to deliver these words.
The enkai is the only opportunity people have to express their feelings to each other. Outside the bar, where alcohol dissolves all barriers between people, polite distance is the norm. Inside the bar, stoic coworkers suddenly appear to be old friends, teasing and conversing.
However, the next day at work, polite distance is the norm. Although everyone was friendly the night before, closeness isn't the norm for office interactions. Conversations never touch on the previous night's follies. To do so would cause embaressment.
Hungover, reeking of alcohol and maybe cigarette smoke as well, the men suffer their hangovers, futsukayoi in Japanese, in silence. We interact as people with a professional relationship, nothing more. The distance remains, until another official work party, when the wall between people falls, disolved by the strength of alcohol.
