From Bonenkai to Bingo: The Party Games Japan Actually Plays
June 17, 2026
Picture a hotel banquet hall in mid-December. The food has been cleared, the second round of beer is flowing, and someone from the junior staff steps up with a wireless mic and a cage full of numbered balls. Out come the cards. For the next twenty minutes, a room full of coworkers who spent all year being scrupulously polite is shouting, groaning, and very loudly hoping for B-7.
This is bingo, Japanese office-party edition, and it's a genuine fixture.
Tokyo distrFood and drink are central to every Japanese celebration, from bonenkai to matsuri.
The forget-the-year party
The party is a bonenkai (忘年会), literally a "forget-the-year gathering." The idea is to close the book on the past twelve months over food and a generous amount of alcohol, then start the new year with a clean slate. It's an old custom. Its ancestor was a 15th-century samurai gathering called a nōkai, which had become the bonenkai we'd recognize by the 18th century and was firmly established across society by the Meiji era.
Most bonenkai follow a loose script: an opening toast (kanpai), a multi-course meal, drinks that keep arriving, and entertainment about halfway through. That entertainment, as anyone who has worked in Japan will tell you, is almost always one of two things: a skit riffing on the year's biggest meme, or bingo. There is rarely an in-between.
The bingo is a popular event because of the prizes, or keihin. At a big corporate bonenkai, these can be genuinely good: electronics, gift cards, or regional delicacies like a box of Hokkaido crab shipped to your door. The earliest winners take the best haul, but a well-run game makes sure nearly everyone leaves with something. The night usually ends with sanbon-jime, a synchronized round of rhythmic clapping led by a senior figure, before the diehards peel off to a nijikai, or after-party.
Weddings, festivals, and the wider game culture
Bingo isn't confined to the office. It's a staple of Japanese wedding receptions too, especially the more relaxed nijikai that follows the formal dinner, where a host runs a game and the couple hands out prizes to guests. A simple game of luck is the fastest way to turn a room of acquaintances into a crowd that's actually enjoying itself.
Step outside into festival season, and you meet the other half of Japan's game culture. At a summer matsuri, the path to the shrine is lined with yatai, the mobile stalls that have been around since roughly 1715. Plenty sell takoyaki and yakisoba, but many run games. Kingyo-sukui asks you to scoop darting goldfish with a flimsy paper scoop called a poi before it dissolves. Shateki hands you a cork gun to knock prizes off a shelf, with the good stuff conveniently weighted to stay put. There's wanage (ring toss), yo-yo tsuri (fishing water balloons out of a pool), and super-ball scooping. The prizes tend to be small, and the stalls tend to be cash-only, but the appeal is the same skill-and-luck mix that makes bingo work indoors.
When the cards went digital
Then the world went remote, and Japan's party games followed. During the pandemic, the virtual bonenkai became a real thing, with teams gathering over Zoom or Teams and the planners scrambling to keep a video call lively. Online quizzes, virtual game shows, and browser-based bingo tools all stepped in to do the job the ball cage used to. A host generates the numbers on screen, everyone plays from their own kitchen, and the prizes get mailed out afterward.
That shift fits a broader move already underway. Bingo had been drifting online for years, from simple Bitcoin bingo games and dedicated bingo apps to full online bingo halls, and the digital version has since branched in every direction. The same game that closes out a bonenkai now has plenty of digital cousins.
The throughline
Japan has a long, comfortable habit of using a shared game to dissolve formality. The bonenkai bingo exists to get the boss and the new hire laughing at the same table. The matsuri stall exists to give a kid and a grandparent the same small rush. However the numbers come out, from a spinning cage, a festival booth, or a screen, the point is identical: a little luck, a small prize, and a good excuse to let your guard down together.
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