Comment by csa

> I find it unfortunate that this article is glorifying the quite exploitative industry of hostess bars in Japan. From Wikipedia:

> > A "snack bar" (スナックバー, sunakku bā), "snack" for short, refers to a kind of hostess bar. It is an alcohol-serving bar that employs female staff to serve and flirt with male customers.

My friend, quoting Wikipedia on a topic as culture-specific as スナック is just flat out irresponsible.

スナック run the whole gamut from friendly place to hang out, to a place lonely men flirt with hostesses, to thinly-veiled fronts for prostitution (and possibly human trafficking), with most leaning much more in the vanilla direction. While they aren’t always easy to tell apart from each other from the outside looking, スナック and キャバクラ or クラブ (or whatever they are calling them at a given time and in a given place) are very different experiences with different expectations.

The bar-going locals pretty much all know the rules and expectations of each スナック. If they don’t know about a specific place, they can usually find out quickly.

The post-ww2 history of スナック (and other local drinking establishments) is fascinating if you can get people to talk to you about it. It definitely has been a way for various types of less-privileged folks (e.g., widows, low education, low social class, etc.) to earn money, some times multiples of what their customers earn. [side note: this isn’t actually as great as it sounds sometimes, as the bar scene has lower social status than a salaryman job, even if the bar owner makes 3-10x what the salarymen make).

To close, the one specific subset of スナック that you refer to definitely exists, but it doesn’t define the whole dynamic genre.

Source: Me. Lived in Japan a while. Dated a スナック mama-san (no money was involved) after I was taken to her place by a friend of mine who was her alcohol distributor. Learned a lot from her.