TOKYO • At a trendy Tokyo cocktail bar, customers sip brightly coloured beverages with sophisticated flavour profiles, designed for a small but growing market in hard-drinking Japan: teetotallers.
At 0%, all the cocktails are non-alcoholic, but the bar 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 is even a word for drinking with colleagues - "nominication".
It is a portmanteau of the word for drink - nomi - in Japanese and the English word "communication".
That has long put non-drinkers like Mr 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.
"There are many times that non-drinkers feel uncomfortable," he told Agence France-Presse.
"You sometimes hear statements like, 'you can't get promoted if you can't drink alcohol'," said Mr Fujino, who started a Facebook group for non-drinkers.
He does not drink because he cannot process alcohol well.
Like about 5 per cent of Japanese and many other East Asians, he lacks some of the enzymes that break down the toxic by-products of alcohol.
Those with the genetic disposition suffer various side effects including flushed cheeks and feeling sick when they drink.
But there are plenty of other reasons that people do not drink, said Mr Fujino, whose Facebook group attracted over 4,000 members within months of him creating it.
Some cite health reasons or pregnancy, while others dislike alcohol or its effects on them.
Some like drinking but have decided to cut back - a group that is growing in other parts of the world and is sometimes termed "sober curious".
Ms Mayumi Yamamoto, 31, who started 0%, said she was inspired to offer better non-alcoholic drinks by her own experience as a teetotaller.
"I thought it would be great if there were drink menu options other than tea and carbonated water for people like me who can't drink much alcohol," she said.
The bar in the popular nightlife area of Roppongi, famous for clubs and drinking holes, offers vegan food alongside cocktails infused with ingredients including basil, mascarpone cheese, seaweed and berries.
Among the customers one Saturday evening was Ms Rei Azezaki, 21, who is allergic to alcohol and had brought along her boyfriend, who is a drinker.
"Usually I drink a lot of alcohol," said Mr Yuto Takahashi, 24. "But here I enjoy drinks more slowly, it's like I'm appreciating the atmosphere more. I like it very much."
Similar booze-free bars are cropping up elsewhere in Japan, with their locations enthusiastically shared on Mr Fujino's Facebook group, and Health Ministry data suggests heavy drinking is falling among young people.
In 2017, just 16 per cent of men in their 20s and 25 per cent of those in their 30s drank the equivalent of two or more glasses of wine at least three days a week - half the number in both age groups from a decade earlier.
Ms Naoko Kuga, a senior researcher at NLI Research Institute, has studied the changing alcohol market in Japan and says young people increasingly have a different relationship with alcohol, particularly around colleagues.
"Young people don't want that old 'nominication' with superiors that lasts hours," she said.
"They'll choose what they want as the first glass, and it might well be non-alcoholic."
AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE
