In Belarus, Lithuania or Kazakhstan, the ridiculously high suicide numbers feel grimly logical. The rates in those countries are intolerably sad and shockingly consistent, but it is not too hard to grasp what is going on: bleakness, trauma and booze are a deadly concoction.

In supposedly wealthy, peaceful Japan, where 100 people take their lives every day and the suicide rate hovers between those of Latvia and Ukraine, it is far less obvious. Attempts to explain Japan’s status as the society most prone to suicide among top industrialised countries tend to fall back on old-fashioned analysis — that this is a culture where suicide is the “honourable” way out and where the act is prohibited by neither legal nor religious sanction.

But, those arguments hold up to only passing scrutiny. The bigger, more unsettling conclusion must be that, despite its many visible successes, Japan’s particular socio-economic model has made a lot of people very miserable indeed. Bullying and undiagnosed mental illness are certainly a large part of the problem, but so too is the straightforward iniquity of daily Japanese life. Companies are sexist, irrational and hectoring; safety nets are inadequate; traditional mechanisms of relief and support — relationships with family and friends — are placed under dreadful strain by work and snap altogether when jobs are lost.

Worse, it seems clear that the suicide rate in Japan is highly sensitive to short-term financial dips and spikes in joblessness — the record rates of unemployment and homelessness in Japan accordingly ring alarm sirens: Nomura’s estimate that “hidden” unemployment may take the jobless rate to 12 per cent increases the volume.

Japan may technically be out of recession, and the new Government appears eager to funnel public cash into the household economy, but experts are already warning that the next few months could drive hundreds of people over the brink. Police operating in the traditional suicide spots, especially the Chuo commuter line that runs through Tokyo, are on special alert.

For the past 11 years, the annual Japanese suicide toll has been over 30,000: the National Police Agency is estimating a 5 per cent rise this year — memories of the 34 per cent rise immediately after the Asian Financial crisis in 1997 suggest the forecast may prove far too optimistic.

The Japanese equivalent of The Samaritans, Inochi Denwa, are in little doubt that there is something more fundamental to blame for the nationally high suicide rate than the Japanese themselves care to acknowledge. “The structure of society has made people realise that life is hard,” says the Inochi Denwa Secretary General.

The difference between this and previous recessions, say both suicide experts and economists, is that there are now fewer bandages to cover wounds that have festered in Japanese society for decades. The manufacturing sector will not pick up the unemployment slack until US consumer demand returns, and that could be a long wait. The public sector, which is where the new government hopes to find all the savings to fund its stimulus, will be even less a source of employment.

There may, said one senior economist, be a glimmer of hope. Wednesday saw the official inauguration of Yukio Hatoyama as the new prime minister. One of the more surprising of his appointments was Shizuka Kamei in the post of Financial Services Minister — a dinosaur from the dark old days of Japan’ cronyism politics. His first proposal is for a loan moratorium for small businesses: they will be excused paying back the principle for a maximum of three years, leaving them only the task of paying back interest.

The move is hugely unorthodox, fraught with moral hazard and will be fiercely resisted by the banks. But, by keeping businesses alive it may help keep a few more Japanese from the deadliest choice.

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