While the Japanese 'aisatsu' refers to the ritual of encounters that permeates the everyday conduct of Japanese society, it also forms a nexus of social etiquette linguistically and non-linguistically speaking, functioning as a lubricant in keeping social relations smooth and in a culturally appropriate manner. This essay describes the different pragmatic functions of aisatsu and provides an ethnographic account of how aisatsu conducts are acquired, metapragmatically speaking. Siding with the idea that pragmatic notions are only interpretable within the larger metapragmatic picture (Coupland and Jaworski 2004, Verschueren 2004), this essay provides a culture-specific case study of the workings of pragmatics in the frame of metapragmatics.