What this new impetus for change will achieve in the near term is another matter. Not only is policymaking absent and reformism on the defensive but the global slump is hitting Japanese industry particularly hard, and foreign workers foremost. In November industrial output fell by a record 8.1% compared to the previous month, and unemployment rose to 3.9%.

A rotten time for rethinking

Mr Sakamoto says he has stopped recruiting for now, but plans no redundancies. Yet sackings of Brazilians have begun at the Toyota and Sony plants in Aichi prefecture. Some workers, says a Brazilian pastor there, have been thrown out of their flats too, with no money to return home. In Hamamatsu city, south of Tokyo, demand for foreign workers is shrinking so fast that a Brazilian school which had 180 students in 2002 closed down at the end of December; its numbers had fallen to 30. Much is made of Japan’s lifetime-employment system, but that hardly applies to foreigners.

© The Economist Newspaper Limited 2008