Desert Safaris and Sake Bombs: How the UAE and Japan Turn Bonding Into a Job Requirement

🇦🇪 UAE · 🇯🇵 Japan

By Priya Mehta, The Global Office

In the UAE, a new hire's first team lunch might unfold at a five-star brunch with camel-milk lattes and no fixed end time. In Japan, the equivalent rite of passage happens at 8pm in an izakaya, where a junior colleague's unofficial job is to keep everyone else's glass full and their own conspicuously empty. Both cultures agree, emphatically, that work does not end at the office door. They disagree, just as emphatically, on where it should end instead — and on whether alcohol is involved at all.

Do's & Don'ts

🇦🇪 UAE

🇯🇵 Japan

Office social life, UAE style

Corporate culture in the Emirates runs on relationship capital rather than headcount. According to Expatica and Commisceo Global's guides to UAE business etiquette, deal-making routinely happens over lunch or dinner rather than in the boardroom, and a 2024 Culture Differences Report found that roughly a third of UAE-born professionals prefer to close discussions in informal settings precisely because they let trust build naturally. Compliments, questions about family, and a slow approach to the actual agenda are not padding — they are the agenda, at least for the first fifteen minutes.

This generosity of spirit coexists with a punishing schedule: the UAE logs among the longest average workweeks in the world, well above the OECD norm. And yet, per Gallup's State of the Global Workplace, 26 percent of UAE employees report being engaged at work — nearly double the 14 percent MENA regional average. One plausible explanation, unglamorous as it sounds, is scheduling logistics rather than sentiment: with a workforce drawn from more than 200 nationalities, most company events default to the lowest common denominator that offends no one — food, not alcohol — which keeps participation high because almost everyone can actually attend.

The rhythm follows the Sunday-to-Thursday week, so team socials cluster on Wednesday or Thursday evenings, before the Friday-Saturday weekend resets everything. Ramadan reshapes the calendar further: working hours shorten, lunches disappear for weeks at a time, and the evening iftar becomes the dominant office social ritual, dry, communal, and non-negotiable in its own quiet way.

Office social life, Japan style

Japan's version is narrower in venue but considerably deeper in ritual. The nomikai — literally "drinking meeting" — remains the default vehicle for what is sometimes called nominication, a blend of nomu (to drink) and communication, on the theory that Japan's otherwise firm hierarchy softens once glasses are raised. Seating charts still exist. Pouring order still matters. But grievances that would never surface in a meeting room tend to surface here.

The ritual is visibly eroding. A 2024 survey of 4,578 companies by Tokyo Shoko Research found nomikai attendance had fallen to 29.1 percent, down from 51.8 percent in 2019 — a drop that continued well after pandemic restrictions lifted. The most commonly cited reason is ki wo tsukau, the mental labor of managing impressions even after the workday nominally ends. Meanwhile Japan's average annual working hours, per OECD-adjacent national data, sit close to 1,633 — modestly below the OECD average of 1,736 — though that figure is flattered by a workforce that is nearly 40 percent non-regular staff working fewer hours; for salaried employees, overtime plus the expectation of an enkai afterward is very much alive. Formal enkai — welcome parties, farewell parties, year-end bōnenkai — remain closer to mandatory than the "totally optional" framing management tends to offer.

The Reckoning

Put the two side by side and the irony sharpens: the culture built around alcohol is shrinking every year, while the culture that is mostly dry is where engagement is, by Gallup's own numbers, comparatively strong. The UAE's socializing is expansive in scope — lunches, brunches, desert dinners, Ramadan iftars — but shallow in alcohol content, calibrated for a genuinely multinational, multi-faith office. Japan's socializing is narrower in venue, almost always a bar or banquet hall, but far more encoded, with seniority expressed through who pours for whom.

Hofstede Insights, which scores national cultures on dimensions like power distance, rates both nations as considerably more hierarchical than the Western average — which is precisely why turning down a senior colleague's invitation carries real weight in Abu Dhabi or Osaka in a way it simply would not in Amsterdam. The mechanism differs — hospitality versus hierarchy — but the underlying message to the new arrival is identical: attendance is data, and someone is reading it.

The Part the Brochure Left Out

Quora — a foreign employee in a Japanese firm described near-weekly izakaya dinners during their first three months, and the quiet exhaustion of treating each one as an unpaid extension of the workday.

GaijinPot — a new hire dreading their first nomikai as a non-drinker found that ordering oolong tea all night drew no comment at all, and worry had outpaced reality.

GaijinPot — a longtime foreign employee wished someone had warned them to eat something substantial beforehand, since the boss topping off their glass unasked was less hospitality than a subtle test of how they'd handle it.

Expat.com forum — an arrival in Dubai assumed a team lunch invitation was purely social, then realized months later that project reassignments and who was on the way out were often signaled first at that same table.

Medium (an independent blog, offered here as a substitute for unavailable Reddit/InterNations threads on this topic) — an employee in Japan felt their promotion track quietly stall after repeatedly declining nomikai invitations, despite management insisting attendance was never mandatory.

Conclusion

Neither system is optional, whatever the official policy documents claim; the honest advice for a new arrival is to treat the first month's social calendar as a second onboarding process, one with its own unwritten evaluation criteria. In the UAE, show up, eat, ask about someone's family, and expect the real business to arrive at minute twenty. In Japan, show up, pour first, drink second (or not at all), and expect the real conversation to arrive after the second round. Either way, the brochure line about "flexible, optional" team events was written by someone who has never had to explain, the next morning, why they weren't there.