The money wasn’t important. We were more interested in having it done in a sanitary office.

A beautiful Saturday at the Castro: well-bred people and well-bred dogs promenade underneath the warm sun and rainbow flags. We turned onto Market and entered a second-story shop called Cold Steel America. The skull of a gazelle glowered down on us from a yellow stucco wall. Amanda sat beneath a large Chinese dragon mask.

The quiet-voiced man behind the counter had a shaved head, with a tattoo of three cherries behind his left ear. He motioned Mandy into the back room, a small office with white tiles. I saw a ten-gallon jug labelled MadaCide-1 on a particle-board shelf. He took down a pair of forceps from the shelf and he put on thin white rubber gloves. As my wife lay down on the operating table, he whispered in my wife’s ear.

It was over in two minutes. “No worse than giving blood,” said my wife, displaying the new gold barbell pierced through her belly button.

Back home and trying to escape jet lag. One of the funner toys I saw in Tokyo: these gloomy bears have a little corner all to themselves in Tokyu Hands, a popular Japanese general-goods store. Very un-Japanese in humor and appearance, I bet they’d do well stateside.

Lexington Queen, Roppongi, five minutes to midnight. Aside from a couple dozen well-dressed natives, this pop-music palace is a ghost town with a jungle subwoofer beat. Two Japanese girls, bluejean miniskirts riding low on their hips, make a halfhearted attempt at grinding on the dance floor, but they sense the eyes of the T-shirt gaijin feeling them up from across the room, and they stop quickly and scutter back to their table.

One woman in particular catches my attention. She’s Nipponese, in tight leopard-print slacks, chain-smoking by herself in the corner. Every now and then she says a few words to herself. Then she stands, boogies for about two minutes with no one in particular, and sits down again, muttering and tossing her bleach-brown locks.

What the hell happened to the anorexic chickies in plastic bras and the smells of barf and whiskey? What happened to the action-movie supermodels whose snapshots adorn your walls? Time was you could cop a feel with a rock star on the dirty-dance floor, or collect a hit or two of cocaine by scraping the cigarette-burned vinyl seat cushions with your fingernails. Time was lesbians were swilling hundred-dollar bottles of vodka and sexing one another in your unsanitary toilets. Not so anymore, Lexington Queen. All the l33t kIdZ are somewhere else on Saturday night. You’ve gone — dare I say it — establishment?

The long series of meetings ended tensely at 19:00. The Japanese and the Americans had spent ten hours straight trying to overcome cultural and language barriers, with limited success. As we wearily stood to leave, one of the Japanese managers bolted from the room and re-entered, wearing a clown wig and a rubber nose. “Hello!” he shouted.

What the hell? I wondered.

“I am the See Eff Oh!” he said, brandishing a large handwritten business card. “Chief Festival Officer!” Everybody laughed happily.

Party games followed. Cases of Asahi and Kirin were opened; somebody strapped a sumo wig to my head. I was made to put my hands behind my back and my wife, just arrived off the subway, was made to put her hands underneath my arms, as though her hands were mine. The CFO put a wodge of strawberry cake into my wife’s hands.

“Please eat!” he said. I slammed my face into the wodge of cake and everybody screamed happily.

Music followed. Someone played the violin; another played the flute. One person played a shamisen and sang beautiful sad songs. Someone else set up a synth keyboard and respectfully motioned me to the keys. He layed out Xerox copies of the sheet music he had in mind, but I didn’t need them in order to play this particular song.

And thus I sang “Country Roads” more or less in unison with thirty Japanese salarymen. They tapped their feet, and wiggled their beers, and crooned pleasantly about a place none of them had ever seen. “Moumtem mamaaaaaa, take we hooooooooo, country rooooodes!”

And I thought, as the shamisen joined me for the second chorus, I have now seen and heard everything in the world.

Eight a.m., Tsukiji fish market. The bustle is at a fever pitch in this dirty, hangar-sized building. Each stall is four meters by four meters, and is staffed by two tired-looking fishmongers wearing smocks and rubber boots. The stalls contain buckets of live or nearly-live animals plucked from the sand or the sea just hours ago: crabs, octopi, mollusks, clams, seaweed, mackerel, and king-sized tuna. Before our eyes, a team of expert fishermen eviscerated one tuna that must have weighed more than me. The tuna was chopped into ten-kilo pieces, squashed into plastic wrap, labelled, priced, and shipped out to Tokyo sushi consumers before our very eyes. Outstanding!

Domaine Laroche Chablis Premier Cru; sea urchin (uni), oyster in sauce and Japanese cucumber; a square of shrimp, okra, toro, caviar; Chateau Batailley Chablis Premier Cru; maguro; foie-gras croquette; pumpkin soup; bluefish and phylleaux dough in thyme sauce; Japanese lime ice; Wagyu steak; creme du cassis with figs; grapes, tangerines, raspberry gelato and a corner of gold leaf; assorted handmade truffles and jellies; coffee.

Dinner at La Rochelle in Shibuya. Afterwards I sucked face with Iron Chef French Hiroyuki Sakai.

Personal status is the essence of power within a Japanese company.

Last night the department took my wife and me to a “Welcome Party.” About thirty Japanese engineers sat with me and my wife in a private room in a noisy yakitori restaurant. After a few polite toasts with dutiful applause, the Japanese began to drink and talk freely.

One drunk middle manager sat down next to my wife and checked out her boobs. By Japanese standards, she’s stacked. “Ahmanda!” he hollered. He babbled thirty seconds of Japanese, eyeing her, and he ended with “I love Ahmanda!”

“What is your hobby?” I hollered back at him.

“Eh!” he replied.

“What is your hobby!” I hollered again.

“Oh! I like folk music. You know?” he replied.

“Yes, I know. I am from a small place called West Virginia.”

“Oh. Joon? Joon Dinva?”

“What?” I screamed.

“Joon Dinva! Almost heaben, West Vaginya!” he sang to me. “Broo Ridge Mountain!”

“Shanandoah Riber!” I screamed back at him.

“I love Ahmanda!” he replied.

Next morning. The elevator slides open on nine and we are greeted by a doll-like office lady. With immaculate politeness she bustles us into the largest office I’ve seen in seven years of doing business in Japan: marble and tile and panoramic windows overlooking this industrial neighborhood of Tokyo.

The chairman sits at the other side of the rosewood table, pulls out a pack of Kool cigarettes and lights up. I sit across from him and try not to breathe too much.

“So,” he says. “What you think about Tokyo?”

With infinite delicacy, the office lady places a cup of coffee in front of me and dematerializes. I take a sip.

He pulls a business card from a gold case and hands it to me. I admire it in the proper Japanese form. Chairman, it says.

“I like Tokyo very much,” I say.

Our meeting ends and I return to the first floor. The drunk middle manager who hit on my wife last night is sitting at a cafeteria table here, drinking water from the vending machine.

“Last night I was drink,” he says, smiling weakly.

I pull the chairman’s card from my wallet and drop it on the table in front of him. I smile broadly into his bleary eyes and walk away.

Three immaculate office ladies — OLs for short — flex their calves in perfect unison on the projection screen in front of me. It’s standard practice in the Land of the Rising Sun, for both morning exercise shows and airline safety videos, to have three Asian chickies in a neat little row, doing whatever synchronized calisthenics are the order of the day.

Not that I’m complaining. I’ve been wine-goggling them all the way to Tokyo. So all of them leg-flexing chickies look just peachy to me.

This business trip is first to the Tokyo Game Show, and thence to the Japanese parent company of my employer. My wife will follow me here in two days, and we’ll have another short vacation. I told one of my Japanese counterparts that this was my wife’s first time in Tokyo. “I am very concerned,” he wrote in an e-mail, “about your wife. This is the first, I think? Is it OK? When you are in a meeting, do you need me to take care of her?”

Now if this guy had been French, I’d have instantly hit him up for nude pictures of his wife in response. But this is Japan, and most businessmen here would rather die than be rude. I wrote back, “Thank you very much for your kind concern, but she speaks some Japanese.”

Still, I’m gonna keep an eye on this son of a bitch.

Chiba City: smudgy and overcast. Apartment complexes, forty stories tall. Each one is heaped together from matchbox-sized apartments. On tens of thousands of tiny balconies you can just make out bedsheets and other laundry, drying very slowly in the soupy city air.

Tokyo: smudgy and overcast. Gas: 96 yen per liter. (Think four dollars per gallon.) Cockeyed radio antennas, giant electrical towers, six-foot satellite dishes, rooftop air conditioning units, kilometers of overpasses and underpasses and over-underpasses, neon backlit corporate logos.

Today’s Japlish: “I’m Star-Beach.”