Some of the angriest people in Tokyo yesterday were the depositors who turned up at the offices of Yamaichi Securities looking for their money back after its ignominious collapse on Monday.
Many analysts and commentators rushed to say that they saw the demise of the country's fourth-largest brokerage coming. But these ordinary investors said they had no inkling that the once-venerable 100-year-old institution was about to go belly-up.
A 56-year-old coffee-shop owner with the equivalent of £335,000 invested turned up at the head office in Chuo Ward complaining bitterly that he could not rely on securities firms to look after his interests.
An office worker with "most of my savings" in the brokerage said she would keep the cash at home for the time being when she got it back - a shocking expression of the distrust of financial institutions in a country with the highest bank savings in the world.
The queues of investors were greeted with exquisite courtesy and smiles by officials who gave them withdrawal slips and assured them that the Bank of Japan had guaranteed that they would all have their money returned.
In Japan exaggerated apologies are the norm - the ticket collector on a train says sorry for inspecting a ticket - but these were humble, abject apologies from people who were feeling real pain, that of their own pending redundancy.
Distress and shame were to be seen on the faces of the brokerage's senior staff leaving through the back door of the same building. From what they said as they departed into the chilly night, it appears that the 7,500 staff at 117 Yamaichi branches at home and abroad also had no idea this calamity was about to happen.
"To my disappointment, I was not informed of the crisis in advance, even though I'm one of the executives. I learned of the failure in the newspaper," said a Yamaichi manager.
"No wonder. I now know why they were unable to inform me - because they were withholding huge off-the-books debts from us," he told a reporter. "I can't immediately think of finding a new job. Employees are all at a loss."
These "salarymen", corporate employees who could expect to be looked after by the company for their life, are among the victims of a revolution in Japan, of which the Yamaichi experience is but one of the harshest examples.
That is the beginning of the end of the stereotypical Japanese company which provided lifetime employment, a corporate family culture, consensus-style management and a predictable rise up the pay scale.
It is a system where people are known by their company rather than by their religion or leisure activity, where managers and white-collar workers go to bars after work to drink "until all hearts melt as one", and where success depends on relationships as well as achievements.
Tokyo is full of bars to accommodate the salarymen, who work until late in the evening and then unwind. It is at the same time a tough business culture, involving submission to the company's will and an average of only 7.5 straight days' holidays a year.
Observers of Japanese social life, like Mr Richard McGregor, author of the book, Japan Swings, believe the salaryman culture is weakening and points out that chief executives have been debating the worth of the system since firms were forced to trim costs when the Japanese bubble burst a few years ago.
Even so, no company had dared to order huge layoffs. Brutal downsizing is foreign to the concept of the corporation-as-family. But the abrupt closure of a national institution like Yamaichi is a major breach of this unique Japanese social contract.
Being fired in Japan is a death of a sort. The word used, kubi, means "to be cut off at the neck". Now the sacred cow of the Japanese social contract, employment for life, is being attacked. "All the ingredients of the management of the Japanese economic miracle, the unemployment and pay system, consensus-building and bottom-up decision-making, are under challenge as never before," says Mr McGregor.
"So far, they have been chipped but not cracked." But under the pressure of this latest financial crisis, this unique Japanese system may finally be cracking.
For the workers of Yamaichi it has well and truly shattered.