At night, there is a considerable crowd around these vending machines underneath the train tracks in Yurakucho. Salarymen whose wives only give them a few hundred yen per day find a moment of relief over a ¥300 can of beer from the vending machines and some after work conversation with friends around the makeshift tables. There are quite a number of these types of places around areas dense with salarymen like Shinbashi and Tamachi. It’s easy to get alcohol in Japan. They don’t have machines that ask for ID or take away your car keys.
That is so sad. Are you for real when you say that these places get crowded? I think if they were that poor that they had to hang out in front of vending machines, I think it’d be a better deal to drink a can of Happo-shu in front of 7-Eleven.
On the contrary, it seems like everyone is always having lots of fun. When I was teaching we would always hang around one of the kiosks in the station, they sold beer and even had a small table. It was lots of fun. Also, a long time ago when I worked in Shibuya, late at night, a guy used to cook hotdogs and sold beer out of the back of his van which was parked in an alley. There were always lots of people and I met quite a number of interesting individuals.