maid cafe and homecoming

It has been a truly and royally hellatorius* week. The newly implemented Financial Instruments and Echange Law has been making my job complicated. Like most things implemented by the Japanese governmental bureaucracy, the intentions are wonderful and the execution atrocious. It seems there are not too many folks in the Ministry of Finance who actually have any clue how the professional, international banking and trading world works. It is not hard to imagine why there is no significant hedge fund presence on shore, for example. Lesse, here's your options:
Establish fund onshore, pay obscene taxes, be held to deleterious disclosure obligations, and be subject to patently xenophobic regulation by at best incompetent authorities whilst bearing the brunt of one of the most expensive cities in the world. Oh yeah, and there are no where near enough accountants and lawyers.
OR
Establish fund in Singapore/Hong Kong, get massive tax breaks, be surrounded by an absolutely humming infrastructure chock full of English fluent, competent support services, regulated by well-behaved and experienced self-policing organizations and pro-business authorities.

At lest when work was done we decided to hit the local maid cafe, GASH. Thursday nights it's open in the evening as a bar, so we headed down there with a quorum. Sadly, it was less than titillating. Besides the fact that the waitresses were dressed in poofy french maid outfits, the place was fairly typical. Decent fried chicken, small but cheap beverages, nice bathroom. The evening was definitely made by the entertaining stories of our former British Army and Queen's Royal Guard HR representative. The best thing about going out with Human Resources is it's like partying with your lawyer; everything you do and say is protected by their oath of secrecy.

A contingent went off in search of debauchery in Shinjuku and I walked home.
HOME, as in my apartment, not that stale hovel in Roppongi I've been living in for a couple of weeks. The ladies moved in earlier in the day and after getting a bit more intensive cleaning the place is once again livable. Took a shower in my newly renovated bathroom and am happy to report a lack of general flooding, so I think the problem is solved.