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The story
A post claiming that “anyone who skips the company drinking party doesn’t understand how organizations work” sparked a wide-ranging debate on 5ch about the link between promotions and attending after-work drinking sessions (nomikai). Some argued that evaluations hinge less on competence than on whether you’re liked by your boss, while others shot back that this amounts to harassment. Commenters noted that the old culture of forcing people to down drinks in one go (ikki-nomi) has faded since deaths from acute alcohol poisoning became a social problem, with more companies now making attendance optional. Still, plenty of pragmatic voices chimed in with takes like “you don’t have to come, but your evaluation will suffer” and “just grit your teeth for two hours” — and in the end, no consensus was reached.
What people said
Whether you see drinking parties as a waste of time or as an investment in connections and trust,
that difference in mindset is exactly what separates who gets promoted from who doesn't.
Corporate lapdog lmaoooooooooooooooooooooooo
You're just a stray dog then
But then you can't complain if you don't get a good position,
your boss doesn't warm up to you, or you don't get evaluated well as a result
That's harassment, you know
That kind of idealistic talk doesn't fly
That's just what a company is
What you're saying doesn't hold up anymore
Excluding shady companies ('black' kigyo), of course
show up to the drinking party without a second thought
Anyone can spout idealistic nonsense
Oh, so you admit it's a shady company then
Getting marked down for it is harassment!
Lol, sounds exactly like the kind of idealistic nonsense you'd hear from someone who's never actually held a job
Back in the day, turning one down could get you threatened, frozen out of work, and in the worst cases pushed into quitting
You shouldn't even have to think about it to get that
These days that would be alcohol harassment ('aruhara')
>For the lightweights who can't drink — rough 'em up, don't let them off with just a token sip
And then deaths from acute alcohol poisoning became a social problem
so the world shifted toward not forcing drinks on people who can't handle it
If you're on good terms with the people you work with, the drinking party ends up being a perfectly fun time anyway
Once your seniority, department, or position changes, that often stops being true though
Though if all you do is simple grunt work, I guess it doesn't matter either way
Nobody's going to complain these days if you skip the after-party anyway
If it's just that much, don't whine about people skipping it
If going gets you in your boss's good graces, skipping it is just leaving value on the table
Say Sales Section 1 has drinking parties and Sales Section 2 doesn't — Section 1 posts better numbers for the company, and it's Section 1's section chief who's getting promoted to department head, guaranteed
Section 2 just ends up a dumping ground full of childish subordinates who flocked there specifically because they heard there were no drinking parties
The problem is incompetent people take that at face value from some competent guy's livestream, copy the same move, and end up never getting a good evaluation and falling behind
But when a company's full of incompetent people who can't communicate well with each other, you need something like a forced drinking party just to get enough communication flowing for work to run smoothly
Background and Key Points of This Debate
The relationship between attending in-house drinking parties and personnel evaluations is a legally murky area. The 2020 amended Act on Comprehensive Promotion of Labor Policies (Japan’s anti-power-harassment law) classifies forcing employees to attend drinking parties with no genuine business necessity, or penalizing them for not attending, as harassment — which is likely the context behind the thread comment “that’s harassment, you know.” That said, since drinking parties are themselves voluntary and outside working hours, there’s no regulation directly stating that evaluations can’t be lowered simply because someone didn’t attend, and actual evaluation criteria vary widely from company to company. The fact that the thread never reached a consensus reflects just that: how evaluation systems are actually run differs so much from company to company that there’s no single right answer. It’s also worth keeping in mind, as background to this debate, that the culture of forcing people to drink was reexamined after deaths from acute alcohol poisoning became a recognized social problem.
*This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (Hello! Project board) thread “Anyone who skips the company drinking party clearly doesn’t understand how organizations work lmaooooo.”
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