Hashigo

Posted on 2006/10/14 03:01:10 (October 2006).

[Friday 13th October]
Well thankfully there weren't any nasty surprises in store on this supposedly unlucky day. The daytime passed fairly uneventfully (and quite boringly), and then in the evening TK and I went for our weekly offsite meeting.

This time we stayed in the area of Tokyo where the office is, and engaged in a bit of a hashigo. Hashigo in Japanese literally means "ladder", however in the context of evening entertainment it effectively is the Japanese answer to that fine British institution - the pub crawl.

It is interesting to me to observe the differing metaphors that the two cultures use for this phenomenon of trying to visit as many different watering holes as possible in one night. The Japanese "hashigo" - ladder - implies a progression in an upwards direction. The British crawl tends to imply more of a deterioration, or perhaps an unruly yet Herculian feat to succeed against all odds. Ladder is a distinctly more civilised metaphor than crawl, however I can't help but think the British version is probably a more faithful representation of the reality.

Anyway, we only went to five places in total, so we weren't exactly breaking any records, but there was a slight sense of adventure to it - the "where are we going next?" phenomenon.

We started off at the Irish pub we often go to, then from there went to a little izakaya/bar that we've also been to several times before. From then on though we moved into unknown territory - two slightly upmarket whisky/cocktail type bars in quick succession, and then finally a "snack" - a slightly odd kind of Japanese karaoke bar, usually a bit old and grotty.

I really like this kind of night out - discovering new places and so on. The likelihood is we'll probably not go back to any of the new bars we found tonight, but that almost isn't the point. Variety is the spice of life, and all that.

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