Flying into Tokyo's Narita Airport at night, you can see flashing neon and cold white sodium lights from 5000 feet above the earth. Forty miles from Tokyo proper -- reflecting Japan's traditional desire to keep all things foreign at arms' length -- Narita handles 24 million passengers each year using only one runway. Its two vast terminals are like countries of their own, where gaijin and Japanese alike hustle into and out of the Tokyo sprawl 17 hours a day.

Even here, a certain nightlife hums. Immaculate Japanese women in four-inch platforms and micro-skirts check their precisely applied lipstick and eyeliner before clicking their compacts shut and heading off to the trains. White-gloved and posture-perfect taxi drivers whisk sararimen, Japan's perpetually exhausted and gray-suited worker bees, to the next meeting, or maybe to a late dinner of rice and sashimi (assorted raw fish) washed down with a beer. Or three, or four.

In Tokyo, it's not uncommon to see groups of sararimen stumbling and laughing through the streets on a weekday night, literally holding each other up as they totter their way to the next whiskey bar. Lacking an enzyme that processes alcohol, 45 percent of the populace tends to get drunk fast, turning red-faced, blotchy and itchy. For Japan's two million alcoholics, that process may take a little longer. Later, bedtime for visiting businessmen will often find them oxidizing the night away in pod hotels where a bed, TV and sink fit into a space not much larger than an overstuffed American couch.

Here, you'll find a second-floor bank of windows where an entire office works until 9 p.m.; across the street, a bar where the waitresses dress as schoolgirls (but the end-of-the-day bell doesn't ring until well after midnight). At the universally ultraconservative corporations, "office ladies" who don't have to wear mandatory uniforms say they wear short skirts and high heels at work because it increases harmony, wa. If the comic books and videos on the subject are to be believed, office males often try to up the wa with a discreet pinch and squeeze here and there, or maybe a casual grope by the copy machine. The wa accompanying office ladies diminishes significantly after the age of 25, at which point most O.L.'s are married and stop working to raise families. The unmarried ones are regarded piteously as Kurisumasu kaki, "Christmas cake" -- no one wants it after the 25th. In any case, coed office parties often go on several times a week, hanky-panky optional.

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