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 then.” “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 for the world here. 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, what’s the use? 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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Dazai Osamu
If you’re broke but you drink anyway
Author | 19 June 1909 – 13 June 1948

“Wait here. I’m gonna go take out some money.”

One night around twenty years ago, I was out for drinks with a college senior of mine. He’d told me he was buying. And yet, he had just moments before left the establishment, leaving me behind like some sort of a sacrificial offering.

Were the same thing to happen today, I would just tell him to pay with his credit card and be done with it. But seeing as the two of us were students back then, both of us the sort of people who blew whatever money we had left and right, we didn’t carry such dangerous items with us.

I knew he wasn’t the sort of person to just abandon one of his juniors. But unfortunately, this guy was drunk. And not just drunk—he was plastered.

Would a man who was this drunk be able to successfully withdraw money from the ATM? And if so, would he be able to find his way back in his unconscious state? What if he passed out on the way? Did this man even have a clear understanding as to his present location?

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(See here for a synopsis of this book.)

You feel so incredibly sick and so incredibly hungover that you can’t even get up.

I would venture to guess that quite a few of the people reading this book have experienced the aforementioned feeling before. If only you hadn’t gone to that second or third bar last night; no, if only you’d just passed on that last drink.

But lying in bed regretting such matters isn’t going to solve anything.

Just as it is apparently important for a company employee to remain at work even when they’re doing absolutely nothing, I have similarly been told by many people older and wiser than me how, come hell or high water, company employees must always strive to make their way to the office, no matter what.

I must say, though, that it has always been a mystery to me how a human being who literally has to crawl their way to the toilet could possibly make it to the office of all places.

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