Japanese imports and exports crashed by their biggest margins since 1957 last month as the world stopped buying cars, semiconductors, electrical machinery and ships.

Analysts described the startling government statistics as evidence of Japan's “canary in the mine” status — it has become a highly sensitive indicator of the global recession.

The 45.7 per cent year-on-year collapse in exports was the fourth consecutive monthly drop, but by far the steepest. Most analysts had guessed that the 35 per cent plunge recorded in December would be convincingly outstripped, but the news, traders said, “heightened the sense of crisis”.

The trade deficit crashed to a 29-year low of Y952 billion (£67 billion), with exports to the US registering a record drop of 52.9 per cent. The yen fell, hitting a three-month low of Y96.91 against the dollar. Traders at Nomura said that the currency was rapidly losing its reputation as a safe haven.

Hiroshi Shiraishi, an economist at BNP Paribas, said that the data would highlight just how much trouble the Japanese economy is in.

The nosedive in car exports was the most spectacular. The sector accounts for about a fifth of all Japanese exports and the falls were catastrophic compared with January 2008 — down more than 80 per cent to America and nearly 70 per cent to Europe.

Even the previously more supportive Middle East and Russia applied the brakes to buying Japanese cars at a record rate.

Within Asia, the pace of decline in semiconductors, chemicals, vehicles and steel painted a dismal picture of how badly the region has been hit. Whereas the decline in Japanese exports to the United States and Europe reveals the acute downturn in consumer activity, exports to Asia expose a much wider collapse of manufacturing and private consumption.

Kyohei Morita, a Barclays Capital economist, said that the recent strength of the yen had made an enormous impact on the January data, but equally striking was the 31.7 per cent decline in imports, caused by the sudden deterioration of the domestic economy and the general slide in commodity prices. It was critical, he said, “to discard notions that Japanese households have a high savings rate and that Japan is a trade surplus nation”.

Japanese savings rates turned negative in the first quarter of last year, according to Barclays, reflecting the fact that many Japanese do not have permanent jobs and that the long period of low interest rates is finally starting to hurt.

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