The party is over for the cash-flashing traders who once propped up Tokyo's Heartland bar - and for the Japanese women hoping to bag themselves a banker
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.
In its prime, the 54 storeys of the Roppongi Hills office tower were a focal point for much that was positive about Japan: it was the spiritual home of Japan's kachigumi - society's “winners”. 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.
The girls make excuses and head to the station for the hour-long ride back to Kawasaki: they understand economics enough to know that they will probably never find the banker ready to induct them to the “Hills Tribe” of well-dressed women living and shopping around Roppongi Hills.
“I think Heartland and the stock markets are the same thing,” says Masabuchi, drawing a downward spiral in the air, “so it is not surprising that the bar has had a kind of ‘shock' of its own. Bankers have always gone to certain bars in Japan, but the ones around Roppongi Hills are different - they became part of Japanese culture as much as expat culture.”
It is the speed of Heartland's decline as a matchmaker between raw aspiration and raw wealth that shocks regulars at the famous bar.
In a country that measures social patterns by the decade and century, it is unprecedented to see one shatter so quickly. “There are two things happening in this bar now, and neither of them is good,” says Noel, 38, a fund manager with offices near by and an apartment even closer. “First, from our point of view, the girls have got the message that Wall Street capitalism is in trouble and the sharper ones are just not bothering to turn up. But worse is that they don't trust us any more. We've still got the nice suits and the job in finance - just about - but these chicks are smart. They know we don't carry the financial guarantees we used to.”
The Roppongi Hills developer, billionaire property tycoon Minoru Mori, made sure that the place was stocked with tenants who would fit his image of a social and economic dynamo for new Japan. For a while the strategy worked. After gloomy years of enforced satisfaction with middle-class mediocrity, a new class of Tokyoite had emerged: young Japanese found it desirable to stand out as men and women motivated by money. Hills Tribe members were interviewed by the Japanese media as the “girl in the street”; their opinion was seen to matter.
While Japan is at pains to think of itself as one huge middle class, many of the girls who shark at Roppongi Hills have jobs in nail salons that may be reasonably paid, but they still live at home. Foreign men - either for a short fling or something longer - are seen as a treat because of the money, but also because there is a view (however misguided) that Western men treat women better.
Mariko Bando, president of Showa Women's University, is one of Japan's authorities on gender issues. “Roppongi Hills came to represent the widening gap between rich and poor in Japan,” she says. “The men who worked there - partic-
ularly the foreign bankers - presented so much more than ordinary Japanese salary men could offer. Japan has had a phenomenon like this before, but the last time was the 1980s bubble, when foreigners arrived in large numbers.” It is not simply a matter of “gold digging”, she says, but about finding a more attractive style of relationship.
“Of course, the interest of Japanese women in those financial businesses and the men who work there will decline, but I think that foreign men will still appeal - even the poor ones. What the Hills experience did was to show the disadvantage that Japanese men have compared with foreign men in the eyes of Japanese women. Japanese men are spoilt too much by their mothers and are just not kind enough to their women.”
Peter, 36, a former sales trader at a large US investment bank, believes that the women of Heartland have developed a sixth sense for layoffs. “The five-year reign of the Roppongi Hills scene bred a pretty canny strain of Japanese woman. I fell in love with at least one of them. It is scary to see how quickly they've disappeared from the bars. And they started disappearing early: these girls are a market indicator to which we should all pay attention.”
In the area's winding streets, high-end pawn shops tell their own stories of sudden downturn and furtive liquidation. Investment bankers - especially the Japanese working for US firms - have taken to nipping out at lunchtime to ditch the trinkets bought in the boom. One pawn shop, L'Ecrin, has a speciality in buying Jane Birkin edition Hermès bags from the nouveau destitute of the Hills Tribe.
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?”
When she first moved into the apartment of her Lehman sales trader boyfriend, her friends, still living in single-room studios on the outskirts of Tokyo, were green with envy. “I'd invent excuses for them to come and visit just so I could show them the apartment and take them to coffee shops they would never normally go to,” she says. “Suddenly, this autumn, it all just stopped. In my mind I'm still a member of the Hills Tribe, I just don't have the money to behave like one.” Roppongi Hills was about more than just foreign money. Japanese wealth was created and destroyed there too. In 2006 two Japanese entrepreneurs were convicted of insider dealing and rumours of a “curse” began to circulate.
“Maybe Lehman was the final victim,” says Etsuko, before hopping on the southbound train to the suburbs. “I'll just go out in Kawasaki from now on. No rich princes to buy me champagne, but at least I can afford the first drink there on my own.”
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