Kawakami Tetsutaro
If you wake up in police custody
Critic | 8 January 1902 – 22 September 1980

Each time the New Year holiday season rolls around I’m always deeply concerned, not knowing when I might find myself waking up somewhere unfamiliar. What with it being the season of drinking parties, there is an exponential increase in the likelihood of me getting slobberknockered.

Drinking in Ikebukuro, yet finding myself at the foot of Mt. Takao the next morning. Feeling a little lost in thought on the JR Yokosuka Line between Chiba and Kanagawa, then wondering how I managed to end up in Zushi of all places. Drinking out in Otemachi, but somehow ending up falling asleep on the streets of Shibuya.

And, of course, you always miss your last train. As someone living in the suburbs on a meager salary, not only is it hard on the wallet but it’s also mentally and physically draining.

In times like those, I like to remind myself of a certain person and it always makes me smile. A person by the name of Kawakami Tetsutaro.

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Yokomizo Seishi
If you just can’t handle riding on trains
Author | 24 May 1902 – 28 December 1981

On my days off, I like to start drinking at noon.

Well… Truth be told, I’d like to start drinking the moment I awake. It’s the cowardly office worker spirit in me that stops me. It’s telling me how, if I make a habit of drinking in the mornings, I might start doing so on the weekdays, too.

But man, do I want to drink. I want to drink. I want to drink. I want to drink it all.

To suppress my cravings for alcohol—which, unlike the waves that come and go, only ever come—I try to force myself to make plans in the A.M. for all my days off. There’s the old saying, “The devil finds work for idle hands.” And indeed, us drinkers, we like to spend any free time we have on drinking.

Yokomizo Seishi, best known for his works like The Inugami Curse and The Village of Eight Graves from his Kindaichi Kosuke novel series, was exactly one of those people who found himself in trouble after spending all his spare time on drinking. Even someone like Yokomizo—an author for whom the descriptor “idle hands” was by no means appropriate—would spend every moment of leisure on guzzling down the drinks.

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Kajiwara Ikki
If you’re just drinking, when suddenly you’re under arrest!
Manga author | 4 September 1936 – 21 January 1987

“A monkey that falls from a tree is still a monkey, but a politician that falls from grace via election is now just a regular person.”

Many of you may have heard these words of Ono Banboku, long-serving vice president and key figure in the formation of the Liberal Democratic Party. The point of his message is: when a member of parliament loses an election, they’re immediately out of a job.

But now in the 21st century, even the salarymen of the world can’t breathe easy.

Gone are the days when the salaryman career was considered low-risk, low-return. Even if you’re someone who works for a major corporation, you could easily wake up one morning only to find that your company has merged with some other company, or that you’re now funded by foreign capital. That kind of thing is not at all unheard of. When companies merge, it’s commonplace for them to do some restructuring to eliminate any redundancies between departments and such, and you could well be a candidate for the chopping block.

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Kojima Takeo
If you’re broke but still you drink anyway
Mahjong player | 11 February 1936 – 28 May 2018

How to drink when you have no money?

This is a major dilemma for the destitute salaryman. “Just sit still and don’t go drinking.” “Why not just drink at home?” If these were viable options, it’d be a non-issue to begin with.

Listen, we’re not asking to be drinking bottles of Rémy Martin in Ginza, or that it has to be literally Igawa Haruka fixing us highballs at the counter.

But hell, it’d be nice to at least get to drink some draft beer in some back alley that reeks of piss. We simply want some cloudy sake to make our minds cloudy, too. Sometimes it gets old just drinking chu-hi’s and watching YouTube videos, you know?

You work and you work, but you just never seem to have any money. You save and you save until finally you have enough that you just might be able to go out drinking. But even if you did, it would only feel suffocating. No wonder you feel miserable—under those circumstances, even great men would be staring into the palms of their hands in despair. Just what is one to do?

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Mifune Toshiro
If you start throwing punches at the yakuza
Actor | 1 April 1920 – 24 December 1997

Mifune Toshiro is a movie star surely known by everyone.

Joining the Toho film company in 1946 and debuting the following year in the film Snow Trail, he won the San Marco Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival in 1951 for his role in Rashomon, making him famous worldwide. Similarly at the Venice Film Festival he also won the Best Actor Award twice, for Yojimbo and Red Beard.

In 1962, he established Mifune Productions, achieving success with large-scale works including The Sands of Kurobe and Samurai Banners. He also starred in foreign films, such as Red Sun and Shogun. Furthermore, he made his name by appearing in several films that now remain etched in Japanese film history, such as Seven Samurai, The Rickshaw Man, and High and Low.

He was also highly influential in the overseas film industry, as evidenced by the fact that he was offered the roles of Obi-Wan Kenobi and Darth Vader in Star Wars (which he ultimately turned down). In 2016, his name was inscribed on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

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