"The first question people ask when you say you're in the bar business in Japan is whether you have to pay money to the yakuza," says Matt Naiman, owner of several bars around Japan and a ski resort.

"The answer is no, we don't. When we were building our first bar in Tokyo's Shibuya, every day we had these three guys coming by in tracksuits and sunglasses, totally stereotypical yakuza, and demanding that we pay them some money. I didn't know what to do — if we didn't pay them, would something terrible happen? At the last minute I decided to go to the police, who said, 'Just ignore them and they'll leave you alone.' "

Naiman was born in Philadelphia, where he dreamed of one day opening his own bar with friend Greg Natali. He spent five years in New York, where he studied at Columbia University and worked as a bartender. Then, having picked up some basic Japanese at college and during a yearlong exchange trip to Japan, he was hired to work for a Tokyo company specializing in furniture design, owned by a friend of the family, and moved here in 1996.