Smash a bottle on your friend’s head over dinner to relieve stress

Feeling stressed out? The Japanese media are often featuring stories focused on Japanese being full of stress, but what can you really do about it? Houses are thinly constructed and apartments have paper-thin walls, so having a good scream is out of the question. This is what brought places like karaoke boxes to life in the first place, but sometimes you really just want to break something.

んだ〜バカヤロウ (nda~ bakayarou) is a new restaurant in Nagoya focused entirely on helping people relieve stress by acting stupid. It’s hard to translate the restaurant literally, so we’ll settle for “WTF?!”.

Both the Sakae Keizai Shinbun and the Asahi Shinbun did features on the place, featuring photos of customers getting doused with water and subjecting themselves to punishment in the name of fun.

Smashing plates in a controlled environment certainly has its merits, but Bakayarou removes the industrial atmosphere of the back of a truck or your ex’s kitchen, and let’s you go straight to the skull of your best friend. Of course, it’s not a real bottle, but that doesn’t mean it’s not satisfying.

In general, many Japanese third spaces are made exactly for stress relief, whether it’s about gaining private time to read, surf the web, or simply get some work done. In this case, getting crazy with some friends in a venue made just for that is pretty interesting, especially when it’s marketed for stress relief.