The Buffet Incident
I came across a story online. A man, met through a matchmaking app, packed food from a hotel lunch buffet into Tupperware. When staff stopped him, he shot back:
“Where does it say that’s not allowed? It doesn’t say that anywhere, does it? Then you don’t have the right to stop me.”
He reportedly went on: “Japanese people get walked all over because they don’t assert their rights.”
Stories like this usually get consumed online under a single frame — “what a tasteless man,” “no sense of manners” — and the matter ends there. But that framing itself is the problem. This is not simply a breach of manners. It is, in all likelihood, a breach of contract, or something close to unlawful removal of property — food that was never his to take. And yet our reflex is to receive it as a “manners” issue.
That reflex is what I want to examine here.
What the Word “Manners” Is Made to Carry
A buffet agreement is a conditional service contract: “eat as much as you like, on the premises.” It is not a contract under which the establishment transfers ownership of unconsumed food to the customer. Whether or not the ban on takeaways is spelled out anywhere is beside the point — it follows from the nature of the contract itself.
Yet in practice, in Japan, this kind of issue is rarely framed as “that violates our terms” or “that falls outside the contract.” It is almost always folded into vaguer language — “as a matter of manners,” “as common sense.” Through this substitution, a matter that should be settled legally and contractually is dressed up instead as a moral lecture.
This reduction to “manners” performs at least three functions.
First, it obscures where responsibility actually lies. A “breach of manners” is a moral reproach at most; it never becomes a matter of legal liability. That is precisely what gives a man like this the room to say, “Where does it say that’s not allowed? It doesn’t say that anywhere, does it? Then you don’t have the right to stop me.”
Second, it puts the counterargument itself on the table. “Manners” is a concept that presupposes the absence of written rules, so the logic of “if it isn’t written down, I’m free to do it” gains a foothold — on that particular ground. On the ground of contract, this would get him nowhere: “it isn’t written down” is no defense at all, because a contract is constituted not only by its explicit terms but by what its nature necessarily implies, and by good faith. The moment the ground shifts to “manners,” a piece of nonsense that should never survive scrutiny gets to live a little longer.
Third, it weakens the position of the business itself. Instead of saying plainly, “Our contract does not provide for takeaways,” staff soften it into “as a matter of manners…” — and in doing so, hand the other party room to argue back. What should end in a single sentence gets dragged into a pointless back-and-forth.
An Inflated Sense of Rights, Unmatched by Any Concept to Go With It
What stands out most in this man’s reasoning is how he uses the word “rights.” A right always comes bundled with a corresponding obligation, a scope, and a limit set by the other party’s reasonable expectations. In his mind, however, a right functions as a blanket license: anything not explicitly forbidden may be freely exercised. This is not legal reasoning. It is emotional self-justification, dressed up in the vocabulary of rights.
The causes behind this phenomenon are probably best understood as compound rather than singular.
- A shortage of practical legal education in schools — the ideals of rights are taught, but almost no classroom time goes to the concrete mechanics of how a contract is formed, or where a right’s limits lie
- Outside law faculties, university students in Japan have essentially no opportunity to study contract law or the structure of rights and obligations systematically
- A service culture built on “the customer is god” — businesses have spent decades declining to assert their own contractual terms plainly, and deference on that side has let the customer’s sense of entitlement swell unchecked
- And above all, the word “manners” itself, which has continually pushed questions of contract and rules outside the domain of legal reasoning
Stacked together, these produce the soil that grows people like this: an inflated sense of having rights, unaccompanied by any real grasp of what a right-and-obligation relationship actually is.
Stop Reducing Everything to “Manners”
Which is why I want to say plainly: the habit of settling everything as “a matter of manners” needs to stop.
This is not merely a question of word choice. Continuing to process real disputes through the fog of vague moral language is itself what drives the ongoing decay of legal reasoning across the society — cause and effect, both at once.
The reason this idiot buffet man got to wave “rights” around so triumphantly is that the establishment, and every article criticizing him afterward, had already so thoughtfully set the stage as a matter of “manners.” Had the stage been set from the start as “this is a breach of contract,” his smug little piece of sophistry would never have survived a single second.
And this is not confined to restaurants. Behavior on trains, workplace customs, most of what gets filed under “unwritten rules” — a great deal of it is in fact underwritten by real law or real contract. As long as we keep taking refuge in the word “manners” instead of looking that squarely in the eye, we keep surrendering the very language we’d need to refute the claim that “if it isn’t forbidden in writing, anything goes.”
No New Rules Are Needed
Let me head off one likely misreading. “Stop treating this as manners” does not mean we need to draft a new thicket of detailed rules. Nothing of the sort is required.
A service contract already exists between a restaurant and its customer. The same is true, as a matter of course, of essentially every other kind of customer-facing business — some contractual relationship is already in force. There is no need to invent new rules at all. The only issue is that customers either don’t know this, pretend not to notice, or simply don’t understand it.
And in more serious cases, this stops being a matter of contract at all, let alone manners — it starts meeting the elements of criminal offenses: theft, or, should a scuffle break out while staff try to physically stop someone, assault. Cases actually being prosecuted on that basis would not be surprising in the least. If the establishment had chosen to respond in earnest, this buffet man’s own conduct arguably had one foot already over that line.
The question of what exists in the space where nothing is written down should not be papered over with the fog of “manners.” It deserves to be discussed in its proper terms — what a contract is, what rights and obligations are, and, where it applies, what a crime is.