Nineteen Until the 28th
Izakaya Kotobuki has 60 seats and sits ten minutes' walk from a university in Sendai. It is Saturday, 9:40 p.m., and a group of six students is celebrating a twentieth birthday. Alcohol has been served to the table for two hours, by the bottle. During a cigarette break a part-timer notices that one member, Ms. B, has left her wallet open on the table: her date of birth makes her nineteen until the 28th of next month. When the part-timer quietly asks the organiser, he laughs and says she is basically twenty and has already had two glasses. A second problem appears at the same moment: Mr. C, who drove four of the group, is unsteady on his feet, drank until twenty minutes ago, and says he will drive everyone home because it is only fifteen minutes and he has stopped. The manager is in the office doing the order. The store's written policy covers ID checks at entry only.
1. What must be done about Ms. B, and how should it be done at the table?
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The shop must stop serving her and stop bottle service reaching her glass. Japanese law prohibits drinking under the age of 20 and separately prohibits anyone in the business of selling alcohol from supplying it, with a fine, and a 飲食店 is covered. Because she has already consumed, the obligation is to prevent more, not to punish what has happened.
Do it away from the group's audience. The part-timer asks Ms. B to come to the counter, explains plainly and without moralising that the shop cannot serve alcohol to anyone under 20 and that her licence shows she is 19, replaces her glass with tea or a soft drink at no charge, and asks the organiser to keep the bottles on the far side of the table. Do not announce it to the room, do not confiscate a bottle in front of everyone, and do not argue about 「basically twenty」 - the date on the licence is the whole conversation. If the group refuses to cooperate, refuse further alcohol to the table and ask them to settle and leave.
2. What are the shop's legal exposure and practical options with Mr. C?
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Exposure runs in two directions. If the shop keeps serving a driver who then commits 酒酔い運転, it faces the Road Traffic Act provisions penalising the provision of alcohol or a vehicle to a drunk driver, and the driver faces a far heavier charge than 酒気帯び. 「I stopped twenty minutes ago」 is irrelevant: elimination is far slower than that, and his unsteadiness is the evidence in front of you.
In order: stop alcohol immediately, bring water and food, keep him seated. Ask for the keys - a request, not a seizure - and say they will be returned when he leaves by taxi. If he refuses, say plainly that the shop will not hand them back and will not accept responsibility for what follows. Call a taxi or a 運転代行, see the group into it, and give the driver the destination. If he insists on driving, call 110 and describe the car and direction. Record the times and who served him.
3. What should change in the store's policy afterwards?
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Three gaps. First, ID checks happen only at entry, but the risk was a mixed-age group and bottle service, so the policy needs re-checks whenever someone joins a table or age is in doubt, with one standard sentence staff can use without embarrassment. Second, staff need a written drunk-driving script, the taxi and 代行 numbers posted at the till, and explicit authority to call 110 - a part-timer should not be improvising this at 9:40 p.m. with a manager in the office. Third, the store needs an incident log and a short training session, because the statutory fine is modest but the licence and reputational risk is not.
The 「basically twenty」 argument disappears once staff have practised the refusal sentence aloud, and once the manager has made clear that refusing a table is a decision staff are allowed to take without asking permission first.