Some bloke I met forty minutes ago in an izakaya in Nakameguro has just pulled his phone out, opened the QR scanner, and asked me, with the wide shining eyes of a golden retriever, whether I have LINE. Of course I have LINE. Everyone in this country has LINE. It is the WhatsApp of Japan, the app you cannot function without, and it has become the primary instrument of one of the most exhausting rituals in the entire culture: the fake friendship exchange, performed nightly by strangers who will never, ever contact you again.

I've been here thirteen years. In that time I have handed my LINE to what I can only estimate is a thousand people. Blokes at bars. Blokes at weddings. Blokes at the smoking area outside a Family Mart. A man once scanned my code at a funeral. And of those thousand glorious new friendships, forged in the sacred fires of a single shared Asahi, roughly two have resulted in an actual follow-up message. Two. Out of a thousand. That's a 0.2% conversion rate, which is worse than a bloody cold-call double glazing salesman, and those wankers at least know they're lying.

Because that's the thing. Everyone in this transaction knows it means nothing. The dork asking for my LINE knows he will never message me. I know he will never message me. We both stand there, phones out, solemnly completing a ceremony that has all the emotional content of a fucking parking receipt, and then we go home and never speak again. It is friendship as tatemae, the polished public face you perform because the situation demands it, entirely divorced from honne, the actual thing you feel, which in this case is nothing whatsoever.

The great tatemae friendship exchange

Here is the sequence, performed identically across thirteen years and countless bars. New acquaintance decides, based on the shattering intimacy of me saying I'm from England, that we are now mates. Out comes the phone. "Do you have LINE?" I say yes. Codes are scanned. There is a small delighted noise. A profile appears: a cartoon bear, or a photo of a plate of yakitori, or nothing at all. And then, silence. Eternal, dignified, perfectly polite silence. My LINE friends list is a graveyard of men who felt, for eleven minutes, that we might have a new friendship.

So I've stopped. I've genuinely stopped. Now when some absolute muppet lunges at me with his QR code, I say, "Yes, I have LINE. But you're not having it." And the reaction, every single time, is a masterclass in performed bewilderment. The face. The little confused tilt of the head. The ehhh? Pretending, with the theatrical commitment of a man who has never once messaged a foreigner he collected at a bar, that he hasn't the faintest fucking idea why I'd say such a thing.

You know exactly why. You are all in on it. Every one of you tossers knows this exchange is hollow, knows the friendship expires the moment I walk out the door, and yet you'll stand there doing the surprised face because admitting the truth would puncture the sacred kuuki, the mood, the vibe, the collective agreement that we are all having a lovely authentic time. For fuck's sake. It's an app. It's a contact. It's not a marriage proposal and it's not nothing, it's the worst possible third option: a lie we both maintain out of politeness.

Thirteen years of digital confetti

What gets me is the sheer volume of it. If even a fraction of these people had meant it, I'd have a social calendar like a fucking cabinet minister. Instead I have a contacts list full of bears and yakitori and men whose actual names I never learned, a monument to thirteen years of foreigner-as-novelty-item, collected and shelved like a limited-edition Pokémon and never played with again.

I'm not angry that nobody messages. I'm angry that we all pretend they will. Do me a favour. Next time, just enjoy the beer, shake my hand, and let me walk off into the night as the strangers we both know we're going to remain. No phones. No QR codes. No surprised little ehhh when I decline. Just two blokes who had a nice hour and had the decency not to lie about it.

But you won't. Out comes the phone. Every bloody time.