Don't guess. It is 20. And you would not likely get in a lot of trouble for drinking if you are not yet 20.

I don't drink.

It's not that I'm against drinking. I just don't find it at all interesting to do so. Japan makes me drink even LESS. Why? It's impossible to get good beer where I live. Outright impossible. If I do drink, I drink American microbrews. You won't find me drinking Asahi, Sapporo, Kirin, or Suntory swill. And swill is exactly what I consider them.

I drank a Yokosuka area microbrew last weekend. One bottle. Don't think I'd had anything to drink at all for at least a month prior that.

No being in Japan, I hestitated to comment on this, but a couple things came to mind.

In the past months that my circle of friends I see all the time has become almost exclusively Japanese and Korean, my own drinking habits have changed. Though not an alcoholic or binge drinker, in college I could be known to "drink everyone else under the table". But that was in a era where none of us drank to achieve a stupor, it just kept flowing through the evening. As I got older, this tapered off drastically ---- may be a couple of drinks one night a month or less.

But now, its somewhere between the two levels. We always have one or two before dinner, then cap off the night sharing rounds of shots. And if its a night of karaoke/noreabang, the level goes even higher. Reading all this I realized that a carafe of flavored soju goes down pretty quickly these days.:rolleyes:

And I think several of you who mentioned the alcohol being a powerful unihibiter are right. It seems to be the whole point behind our consumption. Get over the nerves of stumbling through foreign languages (on both sides!) and to drop the political correctness that often inhibits serious information exchange between cultures. With us its never a contest to see who can consume the most, and in fact we have been diligent about cutting others off when the group feels they have had enough. That's a very different scenario from what we see in the American bars and clubs around town.

Alcohol consumption definitely increased for me after I began living in Japan

Yeah...to put it mildly. Living dead center of a Yakuza Neighborhood and having lot's of drunken drama's with them is not good for my School. That said....They are basically good neighbors.

Its true, travelling in general promotes consumption of alcohol
i spent a year travelling and 1 year in thailand
it was like a massive night out, constantly, at one stage i spent 3 months drinking everynight, i wasn't working at the time and i had a real good time...
but when i stopped drinking, man i was real real sick