Provenance — where it came from
For decades, most Japanese employees worked on Saturdays. Then, at the end of the 1980s, the five-day week reached the banks and the big companies. For the first time, Friday night had no morning after.
The bubble economy was at full height. Office workers poured into the night with expense accounts and taxi tickets, and this glorious new evening needed a name: 花の金曜日, “flowery Friday,” soon shortened to hanakin. Friday bloomed — with neon, karaoke, and someone else paying.
Then the bubble burst at the start of the 1990s. The expense accounts vanished, the taxi tickets vanished, and a word for celebrating Friday in style began to sound like a photograph of a party that was over. In 2017, the government tried to plant a new flower called “Premium Friday” — leave work at 3 p.m. on the last Friday of the month. Few companies joined. Some flowers, it turns out, cannot be replanted by decree.
Field notes — how it’s used
今日は花金だ、飲みに行くぞ
kyō wa hanakin da, nomi ni iku zo
“It’s flowery Friday — we’re going drinking!” — shouted sincerely, over the roar of the bubble economy.