If you're going to a bar after a conference, be sure not to engage in any networking there! It's unfair to those of us who have trouble making out words in loud backgrounds. Joke is, when I'm at an event that would be offputting to a lot of valued newcomers in some valid way, I actually don't talk about work! In part because I try to keep work in the work box for sanity reasons. But I'm also aware of what bad culture can start looking like in that way, and that the level of business-demanded alcohol consumption in Japan would be actually experienced by me as exclusionary. I think it's fair to claim that nobody is losing out on networking opportunities with me by their not going to something exclusionary-ish (sufficiently that I classify it as No Work Allowed). I hesitate to say such things, for who knows what triggers anti-bragging types; but maybe it doesn't actually help if I don't tout it and potential valued newcomers don't hear about my rule. One must not yield to terrorists, but when the terrorists crawl back in their garbage cans and the bot armies are blocked, it is possible that I will propose this as more of a community norm; not to placate anyone but for being a good idea qua good idea that I was already doing for myself. And if not, and if others act differently than I? Then I suppose it shall be to some others as "no alcohol" and "cannot hear in loud environments" is to me. It does mean that I don't follow some groups when they leave a work gathering, en masse, in majority and not mere minority. But I don't begrudge other people their joy of talking over a roar of background conversation and cognitively impairing themselves. There is too little joy in the world for me to want to take their strange delight away. Even if it is not my joy, and even if they then end up having an interesting work conversation when I will not be there.