Thursday November 13
 
18:24
 
Quality

From The Times:

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.

By 9.50pm, back at Heartland, two foreign men in suits have finally made a move. Haruna and Etsuko clutch new vodka tonics, but are sipping quickly: the suits worn by the men who bought the drinks don’t fit right and the ties are domestic, they could even be polyester. The would-be wooers stumble on the question of what it is they actually do “in banking” and are quickly sized up as frauds, or possibly IT consultants.

I hate Roppongi with a vengence. I never go out there - mostly because it is a pure meat market with low class girls hoping to bag a high class guy.

What’s sad is that these girls - the majority of whom seem to work in Operations or similar “low” jobs - judge guys by their salary, job, and how much they can get. Should they meet a guy who also works in a “low” position, they would disregard him as rubbish - yet they still expect guys to “respect” them. It’s no surprise then that they end up being used and dumped.

A case in point a few months ago. I was in training and there was a girl from operations there. She thought I was just an entry level employee like herself and so we were just chatting away normally. As soon as she found out I was a VP, she suddenly perked up and started flirting. It’s pathetic. And no, I didn’t use her and dump her. I see her around the office occasionally, always trying to be with the “richer” guys.

In the same way that girls know when we’re looking at their breasts, we know when a girl’s interest is for the wrong reasons.

Taeko Hiroguchi, 33, regards herself as one of its princesses, but even she can see that the good times have stopped. “I’ve found three boyfriends in Heartland: two Lehman and one from Morgan Stanley,” she says. “I even lived with one of them for a while and helped him spend his 2005 bonus. These Bulgari earrings were a present from him. Even if we were still going out, there would be no bonus this year though, right?”

Or maybe some of us dont…