The Atarashift Blog
Insights for working in Japan
Guides, interviews, and honest advice for international talent building a career in Japan.
The Atarashift Blog
Guides, interviews, and honest advice for international talent building a career in Japan.
Only 60% of Japanese workplaces still hold drinking parties, down from 75% in 2017. But 87.9% of invited staff attend. Here is which ones to go to.
A nomikai (飲み会) is a work drinking party, usually held at an izakaya after hours. No, you are not legally or contractually required to attend one. But the honest answer is more useful than the legal one. In 2025, only about 60% of Japanese workplaces held drinking parties at all, down from roughly 75% in 2017. When one does happen, 87.9% of invited employees go (ホットペッパーグルメ外食総研, April 2025 survey, n=5,839).
That gap is the whole story. Nomikai are getting rarer. They have not become optional.
Key Takeaways
- Workplace drinking parties fell from about 75% of workplaces in 2017 to about 60% in 2025. Attendance among those invited is still 87.9%.
- The average business year-end party costs ¥4,445 per person, paid by you unless stated otherwise.
- Forcing someone to drink is treatable as power harassment, which employers have been legally required to prevent since June 2020.
- Skip the routine ones. Attend your own welcome party, farewell parties, and the year-end party.
Nomikai is an umbrella term, and the specific occasion matters more than the general category. In 2025, the three most commonly held workplace events were farewell parties, welcome parties, and year-end parties (ホットペッパーグルメ外食総研, April 2025). Those three carry real social weight. The rest are mostly optional.
Here is what you will actually be invited to:
| Japanese | Reading | What it is | Skippable? |
|---|---|---|---|
| 歓迎会 | kangeikai | Welcome party for a new joiner | Not if it is yours |
| 送別会 | soubetsukai | Farewell party for someone leaving | Rarely |
| 忘年会 | bounenkai | Year-end party, held in December | Rarely |
| 新年会 | shinnenkai | New year party, held in January | Sometimes |
| 打ち上げ | uchiage | Celebration after a project ships | Sometimes |
| 二次会 | nijikai | The second venue, after the first ends | Almost always |
The pattern is simple. If the event exists because of a specific person or a specific milestone, showing up matters. If it is a recurring Friday habit, it does not.
Budget ¥4,000 to ¥5,500 per person, and assume you are paying your own way. In 2025, the average per-person budget for a business year-end party was ¥4,445. A private one with friends ran to ¥5,085 (ぐるなび, September 2025 survey, n=1,330). Work events come in cheaper because someone is watching the group budget, not because the company is subsidising it.
Most workplace nomikai run on warikan (割り勘), a flat split. Everyone pays the same amount regardless of what they ate or drank. If you had two oolong teas and your manager had six beers, you still pay the same ¥5,000. That surprises a lot of newcomers, and it is worth knowing before the bill arrives. Two or three of these a year is a real line item alongside the rest of your Tokyo cost of living.
Three exceptions are worth watching for. Your own welcome party is often paid for by the team. Farewell parties usually exempt the person leaving. And in more traditional companies, a senior manager may quietly cover a junior's share, which you should accept graciously rather than argue about.
The typical business group is 7 to 10 people, the most common size in the 2025 Gurunavi data at 30% of responses. Bring cash. Splitting a bill six ways by card at a busy izakaya is still not something every venue handles well.
Worth noticing: work parties cost ¥640 less per head than private ones. The budget is set by an organiser managing a fixed headcount, not by what the group feels like spending. That is also why cancelling on the day lands badly. Someone has already paid for your seat.
It depends far more on your employer than on Japan. In 2026, a survey of 124 high earners found that roughly 90% attend workplace drinking parties. Every single respondent in their twenties, 100% of them, called out-of-hours interaction important to their career (クライス＆カンパニー, released May 2026). Average annual income in that group was ¥12.27 million. It is a small, self-selecting pool of ambitious career-changers. Read it as a signal about one tier of the market, not a national rule.
Set it against the broader data and a clearer picture appears. In 2026, a broader survey of 1,002 workers found that just 46.8% of those aged 20 to 30 wanted to attend work-related drinking events. Mid-career staff came in at 39.3%, veterans at 37.8% (ロイヤリティマーケティング, July 2026 survey).
The useful read: wanting to go and choosing to go are different questions. Under half of young Japanese workers want to attend, yet 87.9% attend when invited. The obligation has not disappeared. It has just stopped being something people pretend to enjoy.
So what should you do? Watch who attends, not what people say. If your director shows up to every bounenkai and half the team goes to the nijikai, attendance is doing real work in that office. If the party is thinly attended and nobody comments on absences, you have your answer. This is the same read-the-room skill that shows up in Japanese job interviews, and it transfers.
The evening follows a script, and knowing it removes most of the anxiety. Nobody drinks until the kanpai (乾杯), the opening toast. Wait for it, even if your glass has been sitting in front of you for five minutes. Then the sequence is fairly predictable.
Seating. The seat furthest from the door, called kamiza (上座), goes to the most senior person. The seat nearest the door, shimoza (下座), goes to the most junior. As a new joiner, sit near the door and near the aisle. You will be closest to the staff, which is the point.
Pouring. Oshaku (お酌) is the custom of pouring for others rather than yourself. Watch for an empty glass next to you and offer. Hold the bottle with both hands for someone senior. It is a small gesture that registers.
Ordering. Many nomikai run on nomihodai (飲み放題), a fixed-price all-you-can-drink window, typically 90 or 120 minutes. The clock, not the group, usually decides when the first party ends.
Leaving. When you go, say "osaki ni shitsurei shimasu" (お先に失礼します), meaning "excuse me for leaving before you." Nobody will object. Leaving after the first venue is completely normal and is the single most useful move in this entire guide.
The nijikai is where the evening gets long. It is a second venue, often karaoke, often ending after the last train. It is also the most optional part of the night, and declining it costs you nothing.
The pattern most guides miss: none of this etiquette is about alcohol. Kanpai, seating order, and oshaku are all ways of marking who is senior and who is looking after whom. Get those three right and nobody will notice or care what is in your glass.
Give a reason, not an opinion. Japanese colleagues skip these evenings for ordinary reasons. In 2025, 56.5% named protecting their own time. Disliking the atmosphere followed at 38.7%, and hierarchy fatigue at 38.1% (Job総研, November 2025 survey, n=421). You are not asking for something unusual.
What works in practice:
There is also a quieter shift happening on the other side. In 2026, over 40% of workers in every age band admitted they hesitate to invite colleagues at all. Senior staff were most wary of inviting people in their twenties, naming generational differences in values (ロイヤリティマーケティング, July 2026). Your manager may be as unsure about the invitation as you are about the reply.
Then don't, and say so once, clearly, at the start. Pressuring someone to drink is treatable as power harassment under the amended Labour Policies Comprehensive Promotion Act. Prevention measures have been mandatory for large employers since 1 June 2020 and for small and medium-sized firms since 1 April 2022. Japanese companies are noticeably more careful about this than they were a decade ago, and managers know it.
The practical version is easy. Order an oolong tea (ウーロン茶) or a non-alcoholic beer at the kanpai like everyone else. Hold the glass, join the toast, and the ritual is satisfied. Almost no one will comment.
The generational data supports you here too. In 2023, just 4.3% of Japanese men aged 20 to 29 drank at levels the government classifies as raising lifestyle-disease risk. That is the lowest of any male age band, against 23.6% for men in their forties (厚生労働省, 令和5年国民健康・栄養調査, published 2024). Your colleagues in their twenties drink far less than their bosses did at that age.
For reference, the threshold used in that survey is 40g of pure alcohol per day for men and 20g for women. A single 500ml can of 5% beer contains 20g (厚生労働省 drinking guideline, February 2024). The market is moving the same way. Japan's alcohol market hit ¥3.363 trillion in 2024, and was forecast to shrink to ¥3.274 trillion in 2025 (矢野経済研究所, December 2025).
Substantially, and this is worth asking about before you accept an offer. Foreign-capital firms and younger tech companies in Tokyo often run on optional, occasional team dinners with no expectation attached. Long-established Japanese corporates, particularly outside Tokyo, keep the full calendar of kangeikai, bounenkai, and shinnenkai.
Company size is a reasonable proxy. Larger, older employers keep more formal event calendars. They are also the ones most likely to have written harassment policies that protect you. The same signals drive Japan's company categories for work visa purposes. It is a handy lens on how established an employer really is.
Two questions to ask in a final interview, phrased neutrally:
Both are normal questions. Neither signals reluctance. The answer tells you what you need to know. Pair it with the other cultural questions worth raising before you sign, including how paid leave actually works at that company.
One more thing worth saying plainly. Nomikai are not the only way information travels in a Japanese office, and treating them as a language test is a mistake. Plenty of people build strong relationships at work in roles that don't require Japanese, and the same is true of the social side. Attending three or four times a year with genuine interest beats attending monthly with visible reluctance.
No. Attendance is not a contractual obligation and cannot be required. In practice, 87.9% of invited employees attend when a workplace party is held, so absence is noticed even though it is permitted (ホットペッパーグルメ外食総研, April 2025). Attend the personal and seasonal ones, skip the routine ones.
Around ¥4,500. In 2025, the average per-person budget for a business year-end party was ¥4,445. The most common price band ran from ¥4,500 to ¥5,000 (ぐるなび, September 2025). Bills are usually split evenly, so bring cash.
No. Forcing alcohol on an employee falls within workplace power harassment. Prevention measures have been legally mandatory for large employers since June 2020, and for small and medium-sized employers since April 2022. Declining once, clearly, is enough. Order an oolong tea or non-alcoholic beer and join the toast.
They are becoming less frequent, not disappearing. The share of workplaces holding drinking parties fell from about 75% in 2017 to about 60% in 2025. Over the same period, the share of workers calling them a valuable place to communicate dropped more than 10 percentage points (ホットペッパーグルメ外食総研, April 2025).
Opinion is split and depends on the occasion. In a 2026 survey, 46.8% of workers aged 20 to 30 said they wanted to attend work-related drinking events, the highest of any age group. For year-end parties specifically, 71.0% of people in their twenties said they wanted to go, ahead of every older group (Job総研, November 2025).
Say "osaki ni shitsurei shimasu" (お先に失礼します), which means "excuse me for leaving before you." Thank the organiser, and go. Leaving after the first venue is standard behaviour at every seniority level, and declining the nijikai carries no social cost.
Nomikai are a smaller part of Japanese work life than they were in 2017, and the direction of travel is clear. Fewer parties, smaller budgets, more caution from managers, and a generation of young Japanese employees drinking less than the one above them.
What has not changed is what attendance signals. Showing up to the events tied to a person or a season says you are part of the team. Skipping the routine Friday session says nothing at all. Learn the difference, attend the ones that count, leave after the first venue, and drink whatever you want.
If you are still weighing up employers, the culture question is worth asking directly in the interview. Companies that answer it clearly tend to be the ones worth joining. Atarashift lists roles at verified Japanese employers, with visa and language requirements shown upfront. That way you can start from companies genuinely open to foreign hires.
Sources
All figures retrieved August 2026.
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