Ben Miller

Today's most intriguing visitor is searching for "Tokyo prostitution" from his -- her?...yeah, right; she's a delegate to a U.N. Conference on the exploitation of women and children needing to get some last-minute information for her paper "Mme Butterfly Meets Jet-Trash" -- room at the ultra-exclusive Hotel Okura.

If only I knew his room #. The hotel is about five minutes walk from here, and I suspect I could pull off smart-ass, potentially bribeable undercover vice cop for a few minutes for the benefit of this first-time visitor yokel.

Letting the unprepared loose in the sexual pay-for-all actually has a serious side. Whenever I read of some poor foreign schmuck reporting stolen credit cards, the story almost invariably involves some American middle-level manager from the somewhat-less-worldly heartland of the continent. He leaves his room for his big night-out, with only a couple of hundred dollars worth of local currency. He is not particularly well prepared for places with mind-bendingly beautiful staff, and where a couple bottles of champagne and a few lap dances later, his cash reserves are insufficient and accordingly his credit card gets whacked for several thousand dollars.

Yikes! What to do? If it's the personal credit card, the wife is gonna kill him. If it's the corporate card, unless he works for boo.com he's screwed. The next morning, I too would concoct an imaginary pickpocket, and back it up with a visit to the constabulary and U.S. Embassy. Either that or lose some combination of wife, house and assets, career.