Two Ways to Never Quite Belong: Japan and South Korea on Making Friends After Hours

🇯🇵 Japan · 🇰🇷 South Korea

*By Priya Mehta, The Global Office

Somewhere in the OECD's statistical basement sits a fact that should terrify anyone drafting a relocation package: in Japan, 89 percent of people say they know someone they could count on in a crisis, and in South Korea it is 80 percent — both below the OECD average of 91 percent, in two countries famous for group harmony. The lesson is not that Japanese and Korean people are friendless. It is that the group harmony was never advertised as being for you. Belonging to a society organized around the group and being welcomed into one of its groups are, it turns out, entirely different transactions, and the expat who confuses them will spend a lonely first year wondering what he did wrong.

🇯🇵 Japan

🇰🇷 South Korea

Japan: The Long Apprenticeship

Japanese social life runs on what anthropologists call the uchi-soto distinction — inside the circle, outside the circle — and moving from one to the other is less an event than an apprenticeship. According to Hofstede Insights' country comparison, Japan scores 46 on individualism, a middle-of-the-road figure that masks how tightly organized its group memberships are once you are in one. The trouble for the newly arrived is that this system was built for people who join it in childhood — through school, then university clubs, then the company — and simply were never designed with a thirty-four-year-old software engineer from Melbourne in mind. Quora threads on the subject converge on a specific frustration: nomikai, the after-work drinking sessions everyone recommends as the gateway to belonging, are often surface-level by design. A great night out with colleagues rarely produces a follow-up text, not from rudeness but because repeated, structured contact — not spontaneous socializing — is what Japanese social bonds actually run on.

The upside, buried in the data, is that Japan rewards patience more generously than it rewards charm. The OECD notes Japan's overall rise in loneliness between 2021 and 2023 was modest except among the young, suggesting the system, whatever its flaws, still functions reasonably well for people embedded in it long-term. Annual working hours have also fallen substantially — from roughly 1,884 hours in 1995 to about 1,607 in 2023 per OECD figures — which theoretically leaves more evening bandwidth for the hobby circles and neighborhood associations that Quora users consistently cite as the actual mechanism that works, as opposed to the drinking parties everyone assumes will.

South Korea: The Loud Apprenticeship

South Korea's version of the same problem is louder, wetter, and considerably more time-pressured. Hofstede's comparison puts South Korea at 18 on individualism — a genuinely collectivist outlier even by East Asian standards — and pairs it with the highest possible score on long-term orientation, meaning relationships are approached as investments expected to compound over years, not evenings. Hoesik, the company dinner that doubles as a bonding ritual and a minor endurance sport, sits at the center of this, and OECD/ILO figures explain why it carries such weight: South Koreans worked an average of 1,872 hours in 2023, well above Japan's 1,607, leaving the office dinner as one of the few remaining venues where non-work relationships get built at all. A Korea Times report on a Statistics Korea-adjacent survey found only 16.6 percent of respondents said they could accept a foreigner as a close friend, versus 29.8 percent who would accept one merely as a neighbor — a reminder that friendliness and friendship clear very different bars. Quora contributors repeatedly flag the language barrier as the real obstacle, since the reciprocal vulnerability Korean friendship expects is hard to fake in a second language, though several note that gift-giving and hosting a meal shortened the distance more reliably than fluency practice ever did.

The Reckoning

Put the two side by side and the paradox sharpens: Japan asks for less alcohol and more time, while South Korea asks for less time and more alcohol, and both consider this a completely reasonable trade. The Japanese system will eventually let you in if you show up consistently enough to a hiking club for eighteen months; the Korean system will let you in faster, sometimes within a single unusually committed hoesik season, provided you can also survive it. Gallup-adjacent research keeps surfacing an uncomfortable data point for both: Japan, South Korea, and Russia have historically posted the highest suicide rates among G20 countries, a grim underline beneath the observation that "group harmony" and "individual wellbeing" are not the same metric, wherever you happen to be measuring them.

InterNations' Expat City Ranking backs up the general mood: Tokyo placed 42nd of 50 cities overall and 39th specifically on ease of settling in, with respondents citing exactly the friend-making difficulty described above. Seoul does not fare dramatically better in the aggregate, but its expat-dense pockets create the illusion of an easier landing that Tokyo's more evenly distributed foreign population does not offer.

The Part the Brochure Left Out

Quora — One contributor described the local expat community in Japan as its own closed circle, standoffish enough that even fellow foreigners took months to warm up to, undercutting the standard advice to "just find other expats first."

Quora — Another explained that shifting from soto to uchi status took the better part of a year, and that what finally worked was a fixed-membership pottery class with the same six people every Saturday, not the nomikai nights that everyone kept recommending.

Quora — A poster in Korea admitted to occasionally skipping hoesik to protect a weekday evening for themselves, only realizing much later that the pattern had been quietly read by colleagues as a lack of commitment to the team.

Quora — Someone else in Seoul expected a much colder reception and instead found the expat-heavy neighborhoods around Itaewon and Haebangchon made assembling an English-speaking social circle almost too easy — pleasant at first, then a mild trap against ever learning Korean.

Quora — A longer-term Seoul resident noted that the language barrier made the emotional reciprocity Korean friendship expects difficult to reach through conversation alone, but that showing up with a small gift or offering to host a meal closed the gap faster than any amount of studying did.

Conclusion

Neither country will simply absorb you the way a Sydney share house or a Berlin WG might; both require a specific, learnable ritual, and the expat guides that treat "go to izakaya" or "attend hoesik" as complete instructions are selling half the process. Japan rewards the person willing to be mildly bored in the same room with the same six people for a year; South Korea rewards the person willing to be mildly hungover with the same colleagues for a season. Pick your discomfort accordingly — nobody hands out relocation bonuses for social stamina, but you will need it regardless.