What Japanese People Actually Talk About With Their Friends

Hi, I'm Aya. I'm Japanese, I teach Japanese, and I get asked this question a lot.

One of my students had just made a Japanese friend. They'd exchanged LINE, and then they got stuck — not on grammar, on content. What do you actually talk about? And is there anything you shouldn't bring up?

I didn't have a good answer ready, so I went and found one.

Japanese media publishes a whole genre of articles on 会話（かいわ）ネタ — conversation topics — written for Japanese people who worry about running out of things to say. They're aimed at us, not at learners, which makes them a useful record of what we treat as ordinary. I checked those lists against what I actually talk about with my own friends.

Below is the overlap: five topics that come up constantly, and a few that quietly don't.

If you're still at the stage of finding people to have these conversations with, start there instead — that's a different problem, and I wrote about it here.

Five things Japanese friends actually talk about

1. Work and school

This comes up more than anything else, but it's not a complaining session. It's closer to checking in.

If you two work in the same field, you end up comparing the same headaches. If you don't, their job is just interesting — it's a world you'd never see otherwise.

You don't need anything clever to open it. This is the line you'll hear most:

That trailing 〜さ matters. It tells the other person this is a normal story, not a heavy one. Most of these conversations stay light, and that's on purpose.

But not always. With close friends, work talk can go somewhere darker.

A lot of people spend all day being polite and careful at work, and that has a cost. Whatever didn't get said at the office has to go somewhere — so with a friend they trust, people do vent. The manager who made no sense. The thing that wasn't fair. The week that broke them.

Going the other way, think about who you're saying it to. Venting is fine with a close friend. With someone you met yesterday it lands differently — and it can travel further than you meant it to.

2. Food, restaurants, and travel

This one has a habit of turning into real plans.

Someone brings up a place. Someone else says they've heard it's good. A couple of lines later you're not talking about food anymore, you're talking about when.

It usually goes something like this:

今度 is vague on purpose. It can mean next week, or it can mean never. But it's still how a lot of friendships here get moving. If someone says it to you, take it as an opening — and go ahead and be the one who suggests an actual date.

3. Social media, YouTube, and Netflix

If you're in your twenties or thirties, this is safe ground.

Same as anywhere else, Instagram, YouTube, and Netflix come up constantly here. A lot of it is recommending things to each other — a skincare product someone found through an influencer they follow, a show they just finished, a foundation someone swears by.

And if they haven't seen the thing you're talking about, that's not a dead end. Telling them about it is the conversation.

You barely need any Japanese for this one:

4. Hobbies like music and movies

This opener barely changes. I've heard it from people I met an hour ago and from friends I've known for fifteen years.

You're just looking for one thing you have in common. One show, one band, and things get easier fast. Now you've got something to come back to next time — and that's usually how someone goes from acquaintance to friend.

If you've watched something Japanese, this is where it pays off. Not as proof that you like Japan. Just as something you can actually talk about.

5. News about friends and family

Who got married, who quit their job, whose kid just started school. This is the everyday stuff of a friendship that's been going a while.

らしい does something small but important — it marks the news as something you heard, not something you know. That keeps it as news instead of gossip.

One thing though. How you bring something up can matter more than the topic itself. And there are a few things that don't come up at all, even between close friends.

What they don't talk about

Money

This is the one people are most careful about.

Salary is something most people keep to themselves, even with close friends. It isn't forbidden — it just doesn't come up, and asking would land oddly.

It's broader than salary, too. Rent, what someone paid for something they just bought, how much a trip cost. Investing falls in here as well — a lot more people started in the last couple of years, but how much they've put in isn't something they'd say out loud. If a friend mentions they moved into a new place, the one thing nobody asks is what it costs.

Politics and religion

These two aren't really taboo. They just don't come up much.

Before an election, Japanese TV is full of political arguments. Between friends, it mostly isn't. You'll hear the vague version — something like "what is the government even doing" — and it usually stops there. Naming a specific politician, or asking someone who they voted for, isn't part of a normal conversation for most people.

Religion is similar. A lot of people here would tell you they're not religious, and asking someone what they believe just isn't a habit. Part of that is how it plays out day to day: plenty of people go to a shrine at New Year, celebrate Christmas, and have a Buddhist funeral, and none of that feels like a contradiction. When belief isn't one thing you'd claim, the question doesn't have an easy answer — so it mostly doesn't get asked.

Neither one is off-limits. If it comes up, it comes up. It's just not where conversations usually go.

So where do you start?

You don't need to memorize any of this before you meet someone.

Pick one thing off the first list and you have a conversation. Ask what they've been watching. Mention a restaurant. Show them something on your phone. That's enough — the rest builds on its own, same as it does anywhere.

The harder part isn't knowing what to say. It's that knowing the topic and getting the words out are two different things, and the second one doesn't come from reading a list like this.

If you know exactly what you want to say and your mouth still won't move, that's a specific problem with a specific cause — I wrote about it here.