Bounenkai - a year end party in Japan
Bounenkai is a party held, where colleagues of work or friends are gathered and drink some alcohol with full-filling food around the end of year.
The purpose of this party, especially with colleagues, is to have fun with your workmates or bosses very frankly and forget about bad things happened in the year. So that, people could get more motivated for the new year and be ready to start a new year with a refreshed minds and hopefully that would give positive impact on their work like more productivity, more efficiency, and so on.
Today, I hosted a bounenkai at my home with my employees. Me and my business partner run a small vet clinic in Osaka, and employ five vet technicians. In Japan, the allowance on blood alcohol concentration level is set extremely low, therefore it means do NOT drive when you have any kind of alcohol. My house is located on top of a small mountain where it is hard to come without driving a car, so our party today was alcohol free party.
Even though, we spent a good time cooking/eating/chatting together.
Our vet clinic operates 365 days, so we still got more than a week to work this year, but it was still a good head up for 2013!