Tokyo's pricey bars and pubs can quickly bust a wallet -- and sometimes a marriage.Although it's hardly the experience of the typical tourist to Japan, most surely can't help but wonder about the apparent conformity on show among the legions of black-suited office workers crowding every train and coffee shop in central Tokyo.
Are they really all just drones in service to the Greater Good and are they actually as boring as they seem? In short, the answer to both is a definite "No" -- something I found out when I donned a black suit of my own and joined the salaryman army.
The first thing that would really strike anyone experiencing the daily life of a typical Tokyo white-collar worker for the first time would be the staunch patience and discipline needed to survive in the Japanese business world.
From the start of each day, you utterly surrender your individuality, first physically on the jam-packed commuter trains, then mentality at an office dominated by groupthink and tedious rules. Day after day you walk the line, kowtow to superiors and swallow your opinions.
It's in this repressed atmosphere that I've witnessed the flourishing practice of hesokuri, or keeping a secret pocket money stash, which works as a kind of freedom fund for salarymen. The inspiration? Restoring personal sanity with off-family-balance-sheet detours into Tokyo's retail wonderland.
"Almost all Japanese salarymen have a secret bank account," says Mr. H., an executive at my former employer, one of Japan's largest conglomerates.
"There are so many ways to use it, and it actually is basic policy for Japanese companies to support it."
Recessionary shift
Hmm -- hang out here, or head home to the wife and her spreadsheets?Hesokuri is a term that's been around since the Edo period of Japanese history. It's often been equated with money that housewives secretly stash away for shopping and dining.
But that definition was more applicable to the economic bubble period of the late 1970s and 1980s, when huge corporate expense accounts paid for the salaryman's hedonistic entertainment and housewives raided their husbands' fat company bonuses.
More on CNNGO: The salaryman strikes back
From what I've seen, two decades of stagnation have drastically altered the use of hesokuri. The stakes these days are much lower -- big expense accounts are gone and fat bonuses are rare, so the modern wife has slim pickings.
So now, it's the salarymen who quietly and methodically create a hesokuri with skimmed wads of cash.
Hats in the airIn the places I've worked, hesokuri has been a natural expression of accumulated, unexpressed employee frustration.
When work is finally over, the tension is explosively released -- never belligerently, but rather with an earnest feeling shared with co-workers, like hats being thrown in the air together. I wish I could find a bar in the United States half as cheery as the typical Tokyo izakaya.
For many salarymen -- especially those with no time to see family or friends -- this hesokuri-funded, nightly drinking bout is the one thing that makes weekday life worth living. And in lieu of the long-gone corporate expense account, the spirit-building value this represents to the typical company cannot be understated.
A hush-hush topicStill, you won't find "hesokuri" listed in any Japanese company's handbook. In the beginning, I had to quietly ask around to learn more, starting with a veteran manager who sat next to me.
His response was instructive. He leaned over in his chair and whispered conspiratorially: "If hesokuri yes ..." He made a motion of upending a bottle and sucked noisily. "If hesokuri no ..." He made a choking sound and pretended to slash his lower stomach with a sword in the manner of seppuku, the samurai ritual suicide by disembowelment.
He then pointed over to the desk of Mr. H, my boss, indicating he'd hook me up if I wanted: "Get hesokuri ... you very like."
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