There is a particular sound to 5 o'clock in Tokyo: the slide of an izakaya door, the hiss of a draft beer being pulled, and the collective exhale of a city clocking off. In the narrow, lantern-lit alleys of Shinjuku's Omoide Yokocho or the tiny bars of Golden Gai, salarymen and students fold themselves onto stools barely bigger than a dinner plate and order toriaezu nama — "a draft, for now" — the unofficial first move of the Japanese evening.

Happy hour here isn't about a discount so much as a ritual of release. The after-work drink, the nomikai, is practically an institution — a way to shed the formality of the office over skewers of yakitori and round after round poured for one another, never for yourself.

As the neon warms up over Shibuya and the trains fill with the homebound, Tokyo is doing what half the planet is about to do in turn: greeting the end of the day, one glass at a time.