ABSTRACT
The practice of entertaining clients and colleagues after office hours in hostess bars and other venues offering alcohol or in facilities offering leisure activities like golf became a popular corporate activity in Japan from the early 1960s. In the specific case of fuuzoku settai undertaken in venues offering hostesses for the pouring of alcohol, corporate entertaining functioned in a similar way to ian ryokou in promoting male bonding across rank and other lines of workplace and interpersonal division. Although the post-occupation period saw the emergence of a political environment defined by the absence of direct state intervention in Japan's society and economy, as already discussed, activities like corporate entertaining that aligned with political imperatives animating the state were nonetheless indirectly supported in government policy, law and judicial decision-making. The government nonetheless continued to indirectly back the practice; most costs of corporate entertaining attracted tax deductibility status over the years 1954 to 1982.
