Tokyo is both a playground and pressure cooker: for the young students, creatives and tourists who explore its pleasures it’s a hyper-theme park, while for the perennially fatigued salarymen and women that help oil its economic wheels it is a stressful place. The city’s drinking holes straddle both worlds, providing social lubrication for the pleasure seekers and offering a release valve for the stressed workers.
O sake, お酒, or liquor, is a vital ingredient in Japanese culture and the country has some world standard beers, while quality whiskeys do a good trade here as do cocktails and the vodka-like shochu, a distilled spirit that has become a staple at drinking parties. Some of the best drinking, though, is to be had in Japan’s finest contribution to alcohol, nihonshu, 日本酒, – or saké as it’s commonly referred to abroad.
mapp : : tokyo 