Urisen Houses in Japan

Urisen houses — where you drink with the staff before anything else — are the format with the least published information and the steepest learning curve for a visitor. Ten of them are in our directory, across four cities, and only one publishes a price online.

The single most useful fact about this category is that it is half chain. Five of the ten are Danshi Gakuen branches, in Shinjuku, Ueno, Namba, Nagoya and Sapporo, and all five run the same hours of 13:00 to 25:00 and the same booking process. Learn how one works and you have effectively learned the format in five cities. That is not true of any other category we track.

The exception worth knowing is Chance in Osaka's Nakazakicho, which publishes its full rates in English — private room and outcall, separately — and is the only urisen house in Japan that lets you work out a total before making contact. If the opacity of this category is what puts you off, Chance is the door in.