In hard-drinking Japan, alcohol-free drinks meet growing demand from the ‘sober curious’ and teetotallers
- Japan’s culture of drinking, especially in the business world, often discriminates against non-drinkers
- Alcohol-free bars are rare but growing in popularity, mixing non-alcoholic cocktails for the ‘sober curious’ – drinkers who have decided to cut back
At a trendy Tokyo cocktail bar, customers sip brightly coloured drinks with sophisticated flavours, designed for a small but growing market in hard-drinking Japan: teetotallers.
The bar, called 0% Non-Alcohol Experience, is still something of an anomaly in Japan, where drinking is popular and considered an important part of business culture.
With alcohol as a lubricant, the formality that can govern the Japanese workplace slips away, and drinking – often heavily – with colleagues is seen as important to career advancement for some.
There’s even a word for drinking with colleagues: “nominication”, a portmanteau of the word for drink – nomi – in Japanese and the English word communication. That has long put non-drinkers like Hideto Fujino, a 54-year-old fund manager, at a disadvantage, but he and others like him are speaking out – and finding they are not alone.
