Japan tax economic price incentives rational-irrational

It's the end of the year. Tokyo gets a bit more irrational, at least from an Anglo-American perspective.

For example, tonight I went to dinner with two company presidents. They are small fry, and I mention their positions because it's what allows them to define "business expenses," which can be considered an investment in the future of their companies' cashflow.

This in turn, because of the structure of incentives built into the Japanese accounting/tax system, and their top-of-their-mini-pyramid power to decide what constitutes a reasonable expense, allowed them to cost-justify the following:

(God, I hope their wives don't read this.)

dinner: 3 people; $1.5k, each bottle of wine $200 - probably $30 per bottle or so in Italy

hostess club: 3 people; $2k for two hours; at least 50 beautiful women who will pretend you are not boring the shit out of them in return for money, which they in turn spend on clothes, makeup, hairdressers, massage spas, the leech boyfriend lurking in the background...and probably psychotherapy

strip club: 3 people; approx $5 per minute per person; filled with beautiful women; if you get a lap/table dance it costs $70 for 4 minutes; the woman gets to keep $50; these women make more in four minutes than I make in four hours, accurately reflecting our relative contributions to the commonweal; lucky winners of the genetic lottery; Romanians abound because of the arbitrage between their homeland and their value in the white-skin-obsessed Tokyo flesh market; just to be clear, I am not talking about Mme Butterfly Geisha or prostitution, only titillation

taxi home: cabdrivers standing on the street; I told them I was $30 fare away; they laughed in my face; if they find a guy with a taxi voucher (Dentsu/connetsu, I'm looking at you), they can drive him home to the boondocks, the only place he can afford a rabbit hutch of his own, for $400. I ended up walking and walking and walking ...

But the most interesting thing I found (well actually, thrust upon me by one of the beauties) tonight was a $1 piezoelectric lighter with built-in LED. The beam is not tight, so at about two meters its utility fades, but for its main purposes - lighting the cigarettes of customers and allowing said favored customers to look down the lighter-owners' blouses, by invitation only - it serves its purpose well.

Obviously, the LED-model will be augmented by a similarly priced red-laser model within, say, one year. In another few years, this will be augmented by another option, a low-res CCD for image capture bound up with some sort of wireless (technology to be determined, bluetooth, 802.11?, whatever) connection between the lighter and an on-ramp to the internet.

Futurists say we overestimate the two-year rate of change but underestimate the ten-year rate. My proposition is that, say, seven years from now one will be able to purchase a device for around $1 that provides a feed into (moblogging, inventory control) the good gear lurking behind the black ice.

Presumably the same rate of change is occurring in digital paper and mini-projectors that will allow a feed out from the cloud.

The objects (sorry, women) did not know a lot about piezo, LED, CCD, RFID, mobile barcodes (QRcode)... However, they were able to discuss in exquisite detail the names of their hairstyles - information about which is circulated in trade papers for the demi-monde - including such gems as "soft mohican" and "kabuse wave, half-up." I have not seen so much big hair since the Farrah Fawcett Majors poster on my bedroom wall in junior high school.

follow up:
* webcam the size of a thumb drive
* world's smallest bluetooth gps receiver
* Salon Travel: tales of a Tokyo stripper
* Microvision Unveils Tiny Digital Projector