Sunday, January 11, 2009

Do the Ladder! - Drinking in Japan

This week at work I taught the meaning of the term "pub crawl" to students. See the books we use to teach over here are packed with lots of words, idioms and phrases that students will find useful for interacting with any English speaking natives they encounter. Be it here in Japan or overseas. "Pub Crawl" as it turns out is one of those necessary words. Awesome!

One student I taught had actually spent about a number of months travelling in New Zealand, so he understood perfectly what a pub crawl was all about and informed me that in fact the Japanese had their own turn of phrase for this delightful pastime. "Hashigo-suru", which translates approximately to "Doing the Ladder", is used to describe an evening of drinking in as many different bars as possible. With each bar visited representing another rung/bar on the ladder.

Also, speaking of beer, here are some 130ml beer cans I bought, because well... they're tiny! I must say though the novelty of tiny beer soon wears off when you finish the beer after about three or four mouthfuls. Regular beers cans are shown here for scale.

Tiny Beer!

5 comments:

Unknown said...

It's interesting that the Japanese phrase suggests upward movement and progress (ladder) while our phrase suggests downward movement and rapidly decreasing coherence (crawl).

I was, at first, wondering why anyone would need beer cans that small. After all, to us, a regular beer can is already a small beer, and Japan makes some pretty badass giant beer cans so it's not like they can't drink that much.

Then I realised - It's for cheating at hashigo-suru! This way, they only have to have half a drink in each bar. That's just not acceptable! New rule: Each drink must be at least 300ml or you're the designated driver.

Eleanor said...

Whats the normal drink can size in Japan?

Unknown said...

re: russell's comment - you know, ladders go down as well as up!

Clinton said...

@Eleanor:
Same as in Australia, about 350ml, but some of them get as big as 1 litre!

Unknown said...

That's true.. which I guess implies that you're taking a ladder down from street level (where the bar is) into... the sewer.

Yep, that sounds about right!