With stock markets imploding like condemned 1960s tower blocks and consumers turning their attention from iPods and handbags to canned goods and shotguns, Toyota’s launch of a swanky new mini-car seemed horribly wrong.

The glitzy spectacle felt almost as odd as Sharp’s launch the day before of a new range of super-high definition LCD televisions with built-in Blu-ray Disc recorders. A snip at half a million yen (just under 3,000 pounds), and perhaps designed to appeal to that same segment of society intending to spend about 100 pounds on a pair of handcrafted ebony chopsticks.

It all seems easy to write off as doomed madness in the current miseries, and yet there remains that nagging doubt: for all of its surface lunacy, corporate Japan certainly knows a thing or two about recessions, and, perhaps more critically, about flogging things to people suffering through them.

The apparent wrongness of Japan’s recent slew of new product launches – NEC just unveiled a 3D television screen, and Yamaha launched an expensive hybrid bicycle – hits Western gut instinct on two levels.

The first invokes the straightforward image of rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic: we now have very clear evidence that US and European consumers are badly off their oats, and mounting suggestions that the same will shortly be true throughout much of Asia. So are the marketing pushes, the development costs and even the hire of a giant conference centre for the launch event really worth it when the would-be buyer – possibly skint, possibly jobless but certainly pulling back on luxury - can’t afford the product?

On another level, investors and even some consumers, may begin to question the wisdom and vision of the managements behind these new launches – particularly in Japan which has spent so long persuading itself that a focus on long-term strategy is a reason to deny shareholders much in the way of short-term gains.

Take the launch of Toyota’s new iQ mini-car. This little car, which is 40 per cent more expensive than Toyota’s existing range of little cars, is specifically designed to entice fashionable drivers with deeper wallets and a penchant for cramped seats, fuel efficiency and nice dashboard gadgetry. Even investors with previously unshakable faith in Toyota could justifiably question whether that rather specific cross-section of aficionados is really going to shift 100,000 cars per year in Japan and Europe, as the company expects.

The same doubters could also challenge the wisdom of the multi-billion dollar semi-conductor and LCD panel factories thrown up within the last 18 months by the likes of Toshiba, Sharp, Panasonic and others.

And yet, this is the type of calculation that Japan Inc has been making repeatedly for the last 18 years: certainly, its exports were selling brilliantly overseas, but domestically, it was selling to belt-tighteners and penny-pinchers. As far as the Japanese electronics and auto industries are concerned, the crisis is simply going to leave much of the world looking and behaving like its own domestic market has for two decades: it will be vile and difficult, but familiar.

Because what consumer-facing Japanese companies have recognised through their domestic travails, and what the rest of the world may soon learn for itself, is the astounding power of itten goka shugi – “selective extravagance-ism”, or the art of spending a lot of money on one thing and astonishingly little on everything else.

It is the force that explains why Japanese happily buy a high-definition LCD television but eat off paper plates, or tote their Louis Vuitton bags around town but survive on Y150 (90p) rice balls for breakfast, lunch and dinner. It is a market force born directly out of Japan’s long slump and is, when handled properly, one of the possible answers to an outright collapse in consumerism.

Explore Economics

• Pre-Budget Report 2008

• Budget 2009

• World Economic Forum

• The Times MPC

Times Recommends

• C&G axed - 1,660 jobs to be lost
• UK house prices rise 1.1% as buyers return
• Mixed reaction to US banks repaying bailouts