“An error occurred when attempting to change modules.”

And it was all going so well…

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…

Would the restaurant Buldalk in Shibuya, then, live up to its name? Or would is be another spiced-down-for-Japanese tastes experience?

Initial signs were not good - no Korean menu and a Japanese only pen-scanner based ordering system (!) means there’s likely to be few real Koreans going there, unless they’ve lived in Japan for a while. Delving into the menu, I found that to get spicy Buldalk you have to pay extra. What?! So the standard “Fire Chicken” isn’t spicy? You’d expect a restaurant to be able to cook properly the food it named itself after!

We ordered the spicy one. It wasn’t even close to what you’d expect in Korea. Yeah, my Japanese friends were shouting “my mouth hurts, my mouth hurts” and trying to use makoli (막고리) to soothe the pain - but Japanese can’t handle anything spicy. They put one DROP of tabasco sauce on a pizza, for chrissakes.

That said, it shows just how long it has been since I had real Korean food in Korea that I revelled in last night’s offerings. I haven’t had totorimuk (도토리묵) for ages - in fact it’s the first time to find it in Japan.. that alone pleased me! And even though it only had six slivers of totori, the dressing was like heaven. I gobbled it down trying not to think “I paid 1000 yen for this when I’d get five times the amount for free as ’service’ in a Korean bar in Korea.”

The delights of the night in pictures:

불닭 - Buldalk

도토리묵 - Totorimuk

불고기 - Bulgogi

막고리(동동주) - Makkoli (Dongdongju), a Korean alcohol

소주! - Soju!

None of the Japanese “on the rocks” or “with soda” business!

From the BBC:

The US has never been so unpopular, so derided, and so dismissed by the outside world as it has in the latter stages of George W Bush’s presidency.

For eight years the word that people around the world have used again and again to describe the approach of George W Bush’s presidency is “arrogance”.

Last summer a poll for the BBC World Service, conducted in 22 countries, indicated that people preferred Barack Obama to John McCain by four to one. Almost half said that if Senator Obama were elected, it would change their view of the United States completely.

I personally am looking at America differently today. Finally the “joke” of the world has left and the stuffiness of old men running the country has gone. It remains to be seen what difference Obama will make, but at least there is hope.

Because days get shorter the further north you go, SAD is more common in northern countries.

It really should be “Winter affective disorder” but WAD wouldn’t make anyone smile.

Fat and old. Every man’s dream.

She might just be getting her own back: an hour before I had taken her to a chemist and told her she needed to buy deodourant. Well, how else do you say it?

The campaign to promote Korean cuisine - launched by the agriculture ministry and the Agro-Fisheries Trade Corporation - aims to quadruple the number of Korean restaurants around the world to 40,000 by 2017.

It will include spending $40m over the next two years to try to make Korean food as famous as French, Italian, Chinese, Japanese and Thai food.

There are plans to create Korean culinary schools abroad, develop and distribute standard recipes and introduce an official ratings system for overseas restaurants.

The ratings in Tokyo will be: everything-tastes-the-same, cant-cook-for-toffee, and tonjang. Tonjang being the only decent Korean restaurant in Tokyo - everywhere else is crap.

I can only imagine the Korean Restaurant Missionary Ajummas the government will send overseas to “quadruple the number of Korean restaurants around the world”.

Earlier on Monday the Group of Seven (G7) industrialised nations issued a statement warning that the strength of the yen was a threat to economic stability, which was taken as a threat of co-ordinated action to reduce the value of the currency.

While the yen briefly weakened, it soon climbed back towards Friday’s 13-year high against the dollar.

The yen has been strengthening as a result of the end of the carry trade, in which traders borrowed the Japanese currency and used it to buy currencies with higher interest rates.

As the difference between Japanese rates and those elsewhere in the world has fallen, traders have been unwinding the carry trade, which means they have been using other currencies to buy yen, which has boosted the Japanese currency.

This makes sense. Interest rates in Japan are almost 0%. I always send my money back to the UK to take advantage of better interest rates. The difference between me and Japanese, however, is that I am in no hurry to transfer it back since money in the UK is useful to me. The Japanese seem to be transferring it back even though the rate is terrible.

One of the few exchanges rising was the Seoul market, which reversed early losses to close up 0.8% after South Korea’s central bank cut its key interest rate from 5% to 4.25% at a rare, unscheduled meeting.

There are some real amazing bargains to be had at the moment with the difference between the Yen and GBP, Korean Won. A Nikon D700, for example, at 40%+ cheaper in Korea than Japan - it is usually 40% more expensive.

A woman has been arrested in Japan after she allegedly killed her virtual husband in a popular video game.

The 43-year-old was reportedly furious at finding herself suddenly divorced in the online game Maplestory.

Police say she illegally accessed log-in details of the man playing her husband, and killed off his character.

The woman, a piano teacher, is in jail in Sapporo waiting to learn if she faces charges of illegally accessing a computer and manipulating data.

She was arrested on Wednesday and taken 620 miles (1,000 km) from her home in southern Miyazaki to Sapporo - where her “husband”, a 33-year-old office worker lives.

If charged with the offences, and convicted, she faces up to five years in prison and a fine of up to $5,000.

‘So angry’

A Sapporo police official, according to the Associated Press news agency, said the woman had used the man’s ID and password to log in to the game last May to carry out the virtual murder.

“I was suddenly divorced, without a word of warning. That made me so angry,” she was quoted by the official as telling investigators.

Maplestory is a Korean-made game, which has grown in popularity around the world but has a strong fan base in the Far East.

The game centres on defeating monsters, but players can also engage in social activities and relationships - including marriages - through their digital characters, called avatars.

The unthinkable happened. My entire Google account was disabled. This means my blog, my email account, my calendar… the whole shebang… are gone.

I have followed all of the available instructions, filled out all of the forms… and all I get back from Google is this automated message: “Thank you for your report. The account in question is disabled, and we can’t provide you with access to it.” I have no idea why. I haven’t violated any of the terms of agreements, so I’m guessing that someone hacked into my account.

A similar thing happened to me a few months ago. I set up pop access on my gmail account and set my mail app to download all my gmail by pop - the idea being to backup everything.

A few hours later Google blocked my account and I couldnt get access to it for several days. There was no warning and they didn’t respond to any support. I wasn’t doing anything I shouldn’t do - they provided pop access and all I was doing was using it.

When you come to rely on the services that Google provide, it’s very frustrating when access gets blocked, and even more frustrating when you realise that there is nothing that you can do about it.

I learnt from that experience. I’m still using Gmail - but I now have the email automatically backed up to a second account and calendar sync’d with iCal, which I export to a file periodically. My blogs - all on my own domain - automatically backup to my Mac every night.