My friends and I were flabbergasted when the hostess of our bed and breakfast, after asking us if we enjoyed drinking beer on occasion, proceeded to give us four large bottles of it. We had come to the north of Japan to see the Snow Festival in Sapporo, but being on a budget meant staying in this bed and breakfast on the western coast of Hokkaido, about an hour’s train ride away. I fell in love with it there since the coast was even snowier than inland Sapporo, with snow banks taller than my five foot eight self.
This night was the last night of our four day trip and staying up late drinking liters of beer hadn’t been part of the plan. Refusing the gift, however, would have offended our hostess, so we accepted the beer as graciously as possible. We waited on the tatami mats in our room for her to bring us four glasses, one for each of us. As soon as our hostess left us to drink, however, we started frantically trying to contact our Japanese friends back in Tokyo for some much needed advice.
The ins and outs of Japanese gift-giving weren’t intuitive for us Westerners in the first place, and our awkward arrival at the bed and breakfast only complicated matters further. Somehow, our reservation hadn’t gone through properly and our hostess hadn’t been expecting us. In a country that views customer service as an art form, her unpreparedness was a black mark against her, despite her immediately preparing a room for us and letting us into her own home to wait. Had we been Japanese, we would have been quietly annoyed at her and sure in our belief that it was her duty to rectify the situation. Instead, we were internally panicking about possibly having to find another place to stay, in the middle winter, during the country’s most famous snow festival. Our hostess needed to do something special for us to make amends and we needed to know how to properly accept her gift.
Fortunately for us, being foreigners gave us some slack in the manners department. But just because we weren’t expected to have perfect manners didn’t mean we couldn’t offend our hostess with the wrong response. The four of us just sat and stared at the beer for a little while. A hobbyist could have fit an entire fleet inside these bottles. There was no way we could drink it all. Did she really expect us to drink that much beer? Would she be offended if we left some of it behind? Or would we have to be sneaky and pour it down the sink? The last suggestion, made by me, seemed even worse than leaving some behind, especially if she ever found out about it. Secrets always seem to come out in the worst way possible, especially in Japanese comics.
Since sitting there and marveling at the beer wasn’t going to make it disappear, we started drinking it instead. We each took a glass from the tray and poured each other’s drinks. It was only halfway through our year abroad and we had already adopted Japanese drinking traditions. You drink from an individual glass, which someone else always fills for you so you do not have to fill it yourself. It’s another layer of hospitality, one which says that your friends, acquaintances or colleagues will take care of you and you will do the same for them. We started off our evening of drinking with the traditional Japanese cheer, “Kanpai!” It might not have been part of the plan, but there is certainly something to be said for relaxing with friends on a snowy winter’s night far from home.
As Rosie, the one among us who was most familiar with Japanese culture, got tipsier and tipsier, she had an epiphany. “Of course we don’t have to drink everything! Our hostess made sure to give us too much so that we wouldn’t have to!” Our hostess had given us an excess of beer on purpose: she didn’t expect us to drink it all because it was too much to drink. She simply needed to give us enough for there to be some left, so that she knew we didn’t want for more. It reminded me of Thanksgiving dinner back in the States. My family always prepares way too much food to make sure that’s there’s more than enough to go around. Having food left at the end tells us that no one went home hungry. It might not have been Thanksgiving, but our hostess was certainly thinking the same way.
The following morning when we checked out, we made sure to thank our hostess again for her hospitality and her generous gift. Thanks to Rosie, we could leave worry-free, the undrunk half of that gift still sitting in our room.