Raw Japan

Torture on tap in Tokyo

I am ordering vodka and Red Bull at $10 a pop at the bar of a posh Ginza club and a woman dressed as a nurse carrying a silver tray full of syringes taps me on the shoulder.

“Open your mouth!” she says with a wink.

“OK then.” And she squirts some strawberry-flavoured cocktail down my throat.

Moments later another pretty girl dressed in a skin-tight pink rubber “Cat Woman” suit introduces herself as Azusa. “I work at the Torture Dungeon.”

“Of course you do, sweetheart,” I reply, becoming increasingly confused at how this exclusive “Night of the Body” theme party was being passed off as a “fashion event” with so many people having squeezed themselves into rubber, leather and barbed wire. Whatever cracks your whip, I guess.

An industry in the pink

One evening recently, about a dozen stock traders and a couple of reporters including myself met for dinner and drinks at a Japanese restaurant in Tokyo’s glitzy Ginza district.

It was the second this group had come together, and everyone seemed in a good mood initially, chatting away, drinking beer and sake, as well as enjoying the delicately prepared sashimi.

But things soon turned to the harsh realities outside. It’s no surprise that the world’s second-largest economy and those trading in its financial markets have had a rough ride in the turmoil since the collapse of Lehman Brothers last autumn.

The jobless rate hit a four-year high of 4.8 percent in March and the availability of work sank to a seven-year low. In the securities industry, people have even held pink-slip parties at their former watering holes.

“Am I the only person here who’s not wearing a suit and tie?” one man at the party wondered, and he was right — nearly every guy there appeared to be dressed formally.

He then told me about leaving his foreign brokerage recently and switching to online trading to keep up his market skills.