Is it rude to leave the table seperately?

There are lots of places online where you can find out about how to act when eating a meal in Japan, but what about when you're done eating? How do you leave the table? Does everyone get up at once? Can you leave separately? How does everyone know when to get up? Do they wait until everyone is done eating?

Leave whenever you have to. Just make sure you paid your part of the check :p

I know situations where colleagues, for example, go out to lunch - they usually leave together. If you need to be back at your desk earlier to take calls from customers or do some extra work, you would say "excuse me but I need to get back to work earlier..." or something and excuse yourself (after paying your portion of course).

Otherwise, people kinda "know" when to get up - if you are with colleagues and a guest or two, I do notice that the senior member among them looks around the table to make sure everyone's finished their coffee and are comfortably ready to go :)

I don't think this is anything unique to Japan. It's always good manners to wait until everyone else is ready to leave, but if you have some urgent reason to leave the table first, I don't think it's especially rude, so long as you apologize - and pay your part of the bill!

Okay, thank you.