bonenkai fun
Its Bonenkai season.
A bonenkai is much like a regular enkai, except it occurs at the end of the year. Its official purpose is to ’say goodbye to the old year’, although this flowery, lyrical title does little to detract from the fact that it is mostly just a huge piss-up.
After a particularly busy week, I went to the town hall bonenkai last Friday with the explicit intention of getting rather shitfaced as swiftly as possible. Gulping down my beers with a kind of vampiric lust, my world soon gently lapsed out of focus and everything melted into a state of calm.
As I stared blankly into my Nabe, counting the chicken spines, oysters, fish stomachs and other unpalatable things in the bowl, I could see a world of utter chaos in my peripheral vision. Talking with the other workers at the town office, it became obvious that I hadn’t been the only one with the aforementioned agenda of wanton alcohol abuse. Everyone was wasted.
From the normally quiet payroll clerk who now no longer opened his eyes whilst he groaned out a word a minute, to the man from the economic planning sector who took off ALL his clothes and served people shochu with just a plate covering his manhood, the party was a poignant symbol of the alarming state Japanese people can get into whilst drunk.
Another story.
I went to pick up a friend of mine from a neighbouring village the other day. He was a little late in meeting me but was anxious to tell me why. Whilst walking to the pick-up point, he came across an old man lying in the middle of the road. Since it was pouring down with rain at that time, he assumed the man wasn’t merely resting, and something terrible had happened. Visions of medals, statues and newspaper headlines such as “Foreigner saves village fool” and “Gaijins - they’re ok really” ran through his head.
As it turns out, the man was just incredibly drunk. After my friend shook him a few times, he managed to revive him and was met with a slurred scream of “EEEIIGOOO SENSEEEIIII” as a ‘hello’.
Got to love this country.
