Evidently, stocks are not the only thing that is down these days. It would seem times are tough for gold-diggers too:
Haruna Hiraki pokes at the melting ice cubes with a perfect fingernail and frowns. She has never had to make a ginger ale last this long. It is 9.30pm, she is in an outfit that cost two months’ salary and nobody has yet bought her a proper drink.
“Another 10 minutes, then we’ll go?” pleads her friend Etsuko Shirasu, 25, from across the bar table.
“Waste of time. I told you this place was finished. Lehman, Goldman: they’ve all been sacked or gone back to America,” says Haruna, 25.
It is Thursday night and Roppongi romance – or at least, the calculated brand of romance that used to be the currency in this Tokyo bar – is at death’s door. Heartland, with its low lights and brushed-steel tables, has made its name as a favourite with the financial great and good and the occasional Japanese celebrity. In the warm months drinkers spill out on to the street. However, the bar that once boomed with British brokers, Australian traders, American hedge-fund managers and those Japanese women who would love them has fallen eerily silent. More damningly, says Heartland veteran and former Roppongi barmaid Eriko Masabuchi, it has gone “image down”.
The well-rehearsed choreography of girls coming in from the suburbs in their finery, tasting the good life, then snagging an investment banker to prolong the party, is yesterday’s dance. An entire segment of downtown Tokyo, which rose to fame and fortune with the 2003-07 bull market, has now been spectacularly snuffed out by the crash.
From the moment it opened in 2003 until just a few weeks ago, Heartland used to be the throbbing soul of the huge, glittering Roppongi Hills development. Everything that the investment banks, luxury apartments and high-end boutiques represented was nightly squeezed into that small space in one corner of the complex boisterous with money and ambition.
Sigh-twas once the opposite. A sojourn in Roppongi was like going to a well stocked fishing pond-you still had to know how to cast a line-but the number of fish in the pool made the odds of getting a strike pretty good. Or at least they were until I went and met the S.O. and screwed up the local fishing program. ( I met her in an entirely different, and accidental, way.)
The really sad part is ……how are they going to pay for those Coach bags now?