Tokyo is NOT Expensive

An open letter to my nieces and nephews.

Dear Tiffany, Justin, Onna, Alex, Jeremy and Sydney,
Cc: Your parents

According to the Washington Post, Tokyo is not as expensive as you think. It’s good time for you to come visit me. While the author probably did not stay in Uncle Swint’s neighborhood, apparently, he spent only US$1000 for a week in Tokyo—including airfare.

See article here. (Free registration may be required)

I think that Wash Post writer, Ben Brazil, has penned a new slogan for the Visit Japan ad campaign: “If New York never sleeps, Tokyo never even dims the lights.”

He goes on, “Entering this city of 12 million residents -- 35 million if you count the Connecticut-size greater metropolitan area -- feels like entering a room full of TVs, all with the volume cranked up, and trying to watch every channel at once.”

What are you waiting for? Get you reservations now. Operators are standing by…

There goes the neighborhood

Police and paparazzi were in full force this weekend in Uncle Swint’s neighborhood.

The target: Yoshiaki Murakami, a self-proclaimed corporate raider who struck fear into Japan's insider-run boardrooms by demanding American-style shareholder rights. Murakami was arrested on Monday on suspicion of insider trading.

According our friend Martin Fackler at the NYTimes: “On Monday, a team of prosecutors raided Mr. Murakami's office in Roppongi Hills, a luxury high-rise complex in Tokyo that has become a symbol of the nation's new rich.”

Well apparently it’s the address of choice for the new corporate criminal class. Mr. Murakami lives just one floor away from the now infamous Horie-san who was arrested a few months ago.

Over the past seven years, Japan's best-known fund manager, Yoshiaki Murakami, 46, has pioneered aggressive Western-style techniques in Japan aimed at squeezing bigger payouts for shareholders from cash-rich companies in a country where investors traditionally have little clout.

On Monday, Murakami, a former trade bureaucrat was arrested after admitting he had violated laws against insider trading in an investment linked to Horie-san scandal-hit Internet group Livedoor Co.

Can you believe that all this is happening right down the block from Uncle Swint’s house? We don’t like to think of our little corner of Tokyo as a high crime neighborhood, but…