So how had the recession affected life in Japan, I asked Tatsuo Uchida, plant manager of a rayon factory, as we savoured some pickled plums at the end of a delicious seafood dinner in his single-storey home in the Tokyo suburbs. He thought for a moment, then said: "People aren't buying unnecessary things."
"Like what?" I inquired.
He turned to his wife, Chie, and asked: "What luxury goods are people not buying?"
"Are they not?" she replied quizzically, raising her eyebrows.
This good-humoured exchange expresses the mood in Japan as its economy stagnates and the world frets that a Japanese recession will drag down the global economy.
People know that things are bad, but most Japanese don't experience the recession personally, at least not in a painful way. "It's all in the newspapers and on television," said Mr Uchida, as his wife, his two adult daughters, Satoko and Chizuko, and Chizuko's husband, Toshiteru Saitoh, nodded their agreement. "We don't feel it. We only buy the clothes we need, but we haven't cut back on our standard of living."
But they laugh now at the excesses of the "bubble days" of the 1980s, when people bought things just for the sake of having them. Mr Uchida, a fit 58-year-old whose golf handicap is 11, recalled how golf club memberships worth millions of yen used to be a hot commodity, with people treating them like stocks and shares.
In a country where golf fees are an economic indicator, these are bad times. Some golfers are now holding club memberships worth only one-sixth of what they paid in 1990, he said, and they can't get rid of them.
But for most people life goes on as normal, despite seven years of stagnation. There is no immediate sense, when talking to a family like the Uchidas, of an unfolding crisis, or that the economy is on the verge of collapse, as Sony's chairman, Norio Ohga, warned last month.
There is certainly no hint of a political crisis. "People don't discuss politics," said my host. "They talk about business, or sport." While Prime Minister Ruyarto's popularity is at a record low, there is a sense that politicians are pretty powerless to do much about the regulatory barriers which stifle competition and get in the way of real reforms.
The usual signs of economic crisis, rising prices and soaring interest rates do not exist in Japan. Inflation is at zero. The price of some basic necessities like petrol has come down. Interest rates are negligible. People have big savings deposits.
The shiny shopping centres across the spotlessly clean, super-efficient city are full of people in designer clothes. Modern cars cram suburban streets as narrow and as neat as in Dalkey. There are bureaucratic restrictions on spending money on obvious luxuries like a second car; with living space limited, a person cannot buy a car without having somewhere to park it within five minutes' walking distance from home.
The government does provide incentives to scrap an "old" car and buy a new one by insisting on a costly and very severe inspection after three years of use. People otherwise do not lack the essentials of modern life, like a refrigerator, hi-fi, television, computer, washing machine or mobile telephone.
Many take for granted sophisticated devices which are still not on the market in most Western countries. Mr Uchida's son-inlaw, who cheerfully acknowledged that business in the export company where he worked was terrible, gave me a lift in his Honda which was equipped with the ultimate in gadgetry, a tracking device on the dashboard.
Using a satellite and CD-Rom, it displays a local street diagram on which an arrow follows the movement of his car. And, said the young Mr Saitoh, who got it for a wedding present, the device is capable of mapping the fastest route to an address if he simply dials in the telephone number of his destination.
One of the main reasons people feel cushioned from the recession is the Japanese tradition of a job for life. With its powerful manufacturing sector Japan has only 3.9 per cent unemployment, though this is the highest figure since the second World War. The government sustains this phenomenon partly by devoting 7 per cent of gross domestic product to public works, compared to 3 per cent in countries like the United States. Mr Hashimoto last week announced new public spending of six trillion yen (£32 billion) to revive public spending.
This is good news for the thousands of workers who would otherwise be unemployed but are given work fixing the roads. One cannot drive anywhere in Tokyo without encountering men in uniforms like police commissioners directing traffic with nightsticks which flash like Darth Vader's sword. There is hidden unemployment, too. The pinball arcades in Shinjuku district near my hotel were packed with men in grey suits every time I passed. "Oh, they are all office workers with nothing to do," I was told.
No one in the family I visited has a friend or acquaintance who has been made redundant. However, Mr Uchida said that in some firms the practice of giving a big lump sum to salarymen when they retired at the age of 60 had been changed. They now received a smaller sum at age 55 and reduced wages from age 55 to 60. But full-time workers simply did not get fired, said Mr Uchida, who has 250 people employed in his plant shop.
THE Japanese media, as they pointed out over dinner, is indeed full of bad news, with prophecies of doom and gloom, rising unemployment, a growing youth crime rate - including several stabbings in schools - and dramatic bankruptcies like Yamaichi Securities, the biggest financial failure in Japan's history.
Depressing corporate news fills the business pages. Nine companies each recently announced losses approaching one billion pounds. The property market is dead. House prices have fallen by a half since 1990, and prospective buyers are convinced that they will fall further, so they are not buying.
There has also been a string of scandals, some reaching into the heart of the Ministry of Finance (MOF), the bureaucratic machine which is the true government of Japan. Prosecutors have twice raided the MOF and also the Bank of Japan, hauling away files. They charged the head of the bank's capital markets division with accepting dining and golfing trips 89 times in return for insider information. The scandals have helped deepen the crisis in Japan's 2,200 golf clubs. Company-paid golfing outings for bureaucrats are now out of bounds.
Small business like the millions of corner shops in Japan which rely on charging high prices to loyal customers are particularly vulnerable when people want to hold on to their money, and many are said to be going broke and some are closing.
When a person does fall on hard times in Japan, whether through unemployment or disgrace, it can be unendurable where there is no social safety net and where loss of face is a personal catastrophe. Almost 500 executives committed suicide in 1996, and the number has since been rising.
"To be fired is to be told you are less than human," said an economist. In February three company executives with separate car businesses in Tokyo went to a motel and committed triple suicide with sections of the same white rope rather than face financial ruin.
The traditional concept of honour underpins much of Japanese commerce, reinforcing the contract between an employer and a worker, and the sense of honour also can cushion personal losses when things go wrong in the world of shares and financial dealings.
Over breakfast in a city-centre hotel, a British businessman married to a Japanese told me the story of his wife's cousin from a fishing village who found a job selling securities in a branch of the doomed Yamaichi firm. Every day she was given a quota to sell, so much in the morning, so much of another kind in the afternoon. Her transactions were monitored on a screen watched by supervisors.
One day she was told bluntly she must "mine" her connections to improve her performance. She persuaded family friends and relatives to buy securities from her. When Yamaichi stocks collapsed these people all lost money. The woman and her mother went round their friends in the village giving the money back from their bonus and savings.
Despite life continuing more or less as before, all the bad economic news has convinced the Matsuo family that life in Japan is fraying at the edges, and they do worry about the future. They said they will hardly be splashing out the money they expect under a tax reduction scheme announced by Mr Hashimto, specifically to stimulate spending. Most people will add it to their savings. "People of my generation remember the bad times," said Tatsuo, acknowledging that the situation could get much worse. "The older generation will know better how to endure it. We've been through it. I'm not sure how the young generation will cope."
