Quirky Japan Chronicles – Episode 28: Nomikai Culture — The Office Drinking Party You Technically Can’t Skip
By Yoshi | Japan Unveiled
Every year, at the end of March — as Japanese companies close their fiscal year — and again in April — as the new fiscal year begins and new employees join — a specific type of social obligation descends on the Japanese working population.
The nomikai (飲み会) — drinking party — is one of the most significant and most distinctively Japanese forms of workplace social culture. It is not a party in the sense that it is optional and enjoyable by default. It is an obligation structured as a party, a mandatory social performance that is simultaneously a team-building exercise, a hierarchy-reinforcing ritual, and a genuine human gathering where some people have some genuine fun.
I have attended many nomikai over the years. I have enjoyed some of them. I have endured others. And I have thought about all of them as a specific cultural institution that reveals something important about how Japanese workplaces understand the relationship between work and social life.
What a Nomikai Is
A nomikai — from nomu (to drink) and kai (gathering, meeting) — is a group drinking event, most commonly organised around a workplace or school cohort. The standard nomikai format: a group of colleagues, classmates, or club members gathers at an izakaya (Japanese pub) or similar establishment, shares food and drinks, and conducts the specific social performances that the occasion requires.
The specific nomikai occasions are numerous and well-defined:
Kangeikai (歓迎会) — welcome party for new members joining a group. Held in April when new university students join clubs, when new employees join companies.
Sōbetsukai (送別会) — farewell party for departing members. Held when people transfer, resign, retire, or graduate.
Bōnenkai (忘年会) — year-forgetting party, held in December. The bōnen (forgetting the year) concept is specifically Japanese: the idea that the year’s difficulties should be acknowledged and symbolically released through a shared evening of eating and drinking before the new year begins.
Shinnenkai (新年会) — new year party, held in January.
Dōsōkai (同窓会) — class reunion, held for former classmates.
And various situational nomikai: the celebratory drinking after a project completion, the condolence drinking after a difficult period, the simply-because-it-is-Friday drinking that requires no specific justification.
The Obligation Problem: Can You Actually Not Go?
This is the question that most concerns people who encounter the nomikai system — particularly younger workers and people who find the mandatory social dimension of the nomikai uncomfortable.
The honest answer: attendance at workplace nomikai is not legally required. No contract specifies nomikai attendance as a job requirement. Declining is technically possible.
The practical answer: the social cost of declining is real and context-dependent, ranging from mild (in workplaces with more relaxed cultures) to significant (in workplaces where attendance is understood as a demonstration of team loyalty and dedication).
The specific social pressure of the nomikai operates through the honne-tatemae framework I have written about elsewhere on this blog. The tatemae is that attendance is optional. The honne is that consistent non-attendance is noticed, interpreted as disengagement from the team, and may affect informal assessments of the non-attender’s dedication, reliability, and cultural fit.
This creates the specific experience that many Japanese workers report: attending nomikai they would prefer to skip, because the social cost of not attending — while never explicitly stated — is understood to be real.
The generational trend: younger Japanese workers are increasingly willing to decline nomikai, and the cultural expectation of attendance is weakening, particularly in more international companies and in industries with younger workforces. The specific post-COVID period — when nomikai were cancelled for two years and companies discovered that business continued without them — has accelerated this shift. But the shift is uneven, and in many traditional workplaces the nomikai attendance expectation remains substantially intact.
The Seating Hierarchy: Where You Sit Is Not Casual
The nomikai contains a specific hierarchy expression that is one of its most immediately visible cultural features: the seating arrangement.
The seat farthest from the entrance — kamiza (upper seat) — is the most prestigious, traditionally occupied by the most senior person present. The seat closest to the entrance — shimoza (lower seat) — is the least prestigious, traditionally occupied by the most junior person. The seats in between are distributed according to seniority, with higher-ranking members closer to the kamiza and lower-ranking members closer to the shimoza.
The most junior person at the table — typically the newest member of the team — has specific responsibilities. They pour the drinks of senior colleagues (the pouring of drinks for others before pouring for yourself is standard nomikai etiquette, but the most junior person is particularly responsible for monitoring and refilling glasses). They may be expected to facilitate various aspects of the evening’s logistics.
The hierarchy that the seating expresses is the same hierarchy that operates in the workplace — the nomikai does not suspend the seniority structure but embeds it in the social space of the evening.
The Kanpai: The Mandatory First Ritual
No one drinks before the kanpai.
This is not a rule that requires explicit statement. It is understood. The group gathers, drinks are distributed, and everyone waits — holding their glass — until the designated person (typically the most senior member present, or a designated MC) initiates the kanpai.
The kanpai (乾杯) — “dry cup,” the Japanese toast — involves raising the glass, saying kanpai, and clinking glasses with the people immediately adjacent. The specific convention of holding your glass slightly lower than the glass of a more senior colleague when clinking — a small gesture that physically expresses the seniority relationship — is observed, consciously or automatically, by most Japanese nomikai participants.
The kanpai is the official beginning of the drinking portion of the evening. Before kanpai: waiting, small talk, menu review. After kanpai: the structured social event begins.
The Ippai-Ikki Problem: Peer Pressure and Alcohol
I want to address something that the enthusiastic coverage of nomikai culture sometimes skirts: the specific problem of alcohol pressure in Japanese social drinking contexts.
Ippai ikō (come on, have a drink) and its more intense cousin ikki ikki (chug, chug) — the peer pressure to drink that operates in some nomikai contexts — has been a genuine source of harm. The specific problem: nomikai social pressure to drink, combined with the status dynamics of the hierarchical seating structure, can create situations where junior employees feel unable to decline alcohol without social consequence.
Alcohol-related health incidents at nomikai — including deaths from acute alcohol intoxication — have been documented in Japan, and the specific circumstances often involve the combination of hierarchical pressure, group encouragement, and the specific social difficulty of declining when senior colleagues are encouraging.
The Japanese government and Japanese companies have been increasingly direct about this problem. Harassment awareness programs — specifically alcohol harassment (aruhara) training — have been implemented at many workplaces, and the legal understanding of employer responsibility for nomikai-related harm to employees has evolved to place more responsibility on employers and senior colleagues for ensuring that participation is genuinely voluntary.
The cultural shift on this specific issue is real and meaningful, even if incomplete. The nomikai in which junior employees feel genuinely unable to decline is becoming less common. But it has not disappeared.
The Second Party: Nijikai Culture
The nomikai is frequently followed by a nijikai (二次会) — second party — at a different venue, typically a karaoke room or a bar, with a subset of the original group continuing the evening in a smaller and typically more relaxed setting.
The nijikai is usually more enjoyable than the first party. The formal hierarchy of the nomikai’s seating arrangement is abandoned — everyone stands at a karaoke machine or sits informally at a bar counter. The required social performances of the nomikai are complete; what follows is more genuinely social.
The specific social dynamic of the nijikai — where the evening’s earlier formality has been discharged and genuine relaxation is possible — is when many Japanese workers report having the actual enjoyable conversations that the nomikai’s structure prevented. The colleague you have been politely talking past all evening at the izakaya becomes a person you can actually talk with at the karaoke bar.
This two-stage structure — the formal social obligation followed by the informal genuine social interaction — is one of the more specifically Japanese social architectures I know. The formal stage is necessary for the informal stage to be permissible.
What Nomikai Is Actually For
I want to end with the honest version of what nomikai culture is trying to do, because I think the honest version is more interesting than the critical version and more interesting than the promotional version.
Nomikai exists because Japanese workplaces believe — not entirely incorrectly — that the quality of relationships between colleagues affects the quality of their work, and that those relationships develop more effectively through shared informal social experience than through the formal interactions of the workday.
The premise is not wrong. Colleagues who have shared a meal, who have seen each other in a less guarded social context, who have talked about something other than work, generally work together more effectively than colleagues who know each other only through professional interaction. The nomikai is an attempt to engineer this relationship quality through structured informal interaction.
The failure mode is the structural one: when the informal interaction is not genuinely informal — when the hierarchy is maintained through seating and deference and the social pressure to drink — the relationship quality that the nomikai is trying to develop is not actually being developed. You cannot become genuinely comfortable with someone while simultaneously performing the hierarchical deference that the nomikai requires.
The best nomikai I have attended were the ones where the hierarchy was genuinely forgotten for an evening — where the most senior person present was relaxed enough to let the seniority structure recede and to interact as a person rather than as a role. Those evenings produced the genuine social connection that nomikai culture is supposedly about.
They also, in my experience, required sufficient alcohol that nobody’s seniority felt particularly important anymore.
Which may be the point.
— Yoshi 🍻 Central Japan, 2026
Enjoyed this? You might also like: “Izakaya Ordering Guide: How to Navigate a Japanese Pub Like a Local” and “Why Japanese People Work So Much — and Whether They Actually Want To” — both available on Japan Unveiled.
