It was 1976 when I visited the Japanese trading company handling the electronic measurement products of my US employer. I was soon to fire them, switch to another trading company, and move to Japan to manage the directly run operation, but working with them provided me an inside look into the situation of going through a trading company to sell products of a US company in Japan.
One day, while chatting with my contact at the company—a section head at the time—he happened to mention that people from Korea were visiting them that day. It was about 5:30pm. He said they always visited around that time, and you know exactly what they expected to be treated to. It still being in the 1970s, might guess was that it was not just dinner and drinks.
The trading company evidently got the benefit of a war reparations agreement between Japan and Korea (money from the Japanese government given to a foreign state and boomeranging back to a Japanese trading company, which is not uncommon), and I guess that emboldened the Korea people to ask for something more than products sold by the trading company.
The only other time I had encountered such entertainment was a few years after that, when I was at dinner attended by a company president—now deceased, and the founder of an older, TSE-listed company (before he was essentially ousted by a bank and a major computer manufacturer in a takeover)—and a European dealer of his new company, who was visiting Japan.
At dinner, the CEO leaned over to me and essentially asked me whether he should arrange for a woman for his visitor. Without interpreting, of course, I advised him that it would be a risky move and might even worsen the relationship with his dealer. He (I hope) withdrew the idea of setting his visitor up with some evening diversion.
There are landmines on the road to success in Japan, and sometimes the Japanese themselves risk treading on them.