Two-hour limit

One of the most impenetrable concepts in Japan was the two-hour limit on restaurant reservations.  If you called a restaurant and reserved a table, you'd be warned that you had to leave after two hours.  And, sure enough, even if you were prepared to order more food, consume more booze, and fatten the restaurant's bottom line, when two hours were up, you'd be given the check and politely told that your time was up.  However, if you simply showed up without bothering to call first, there was no limit on how long you could stay.

Let me explain the absurdity a little further.  Izakayas in Japan were often open till 11:00 p.m. or later, but the mostly after-work crowd would thin out fast after 9:00 p.m., either because people wanted to move to another spot or because they had a long train ride to deepest Chiba or darkest Kanagawa and needed to get home.  There wasn't a "second seating" as there might be in a popular New York restaurant, so no one was lined up waiting for your seat after the initial rush.  You might think that, in a restaurant that was emptying out, but still open for several more hours, they'd be happy for you to continue to eat and drink, especially if you were a large group (the only time I ever bothered to make a reservation).  Not so.  If your reservation started at 7:00 pm, you were out at 9:00, period.  But, just show up with the same group at the same time without any prior warning and the staff would often be too polite to ask you to leave even if you ran right up against closing time.

I only found my way around this conundrum once.  I brought a large group of friends to an izakaya I frequented in Shibuya.  When the two hour mark rolled around, the waiter came up and told us that our reservation was up.  We looked around and found the restaurant was emptying out, with no one waiting.  We'd like to stay longer, I told the waiter.  "I'm so sorry," he responded, "but we have a two-hour limit on reservations."  "Well," I told him, "we want to keep on eating and drinking.  Can you recommend a good place nearby?"

The waiter went and consulted with the manager, who hurriedly came over and said we could stay.  Evidently the prospect of losing money to a competitor awakened the man's capitalist instincts.