In a declaration of policy that will dismay both domestic and foreign investors, Japan’s new Financial Services Minister yesterday reiterated his demand for a return to traditional business practices and insisted that “there will be no apeing of America” on his watch.

Companies are not “money-making tools” for enriching shareholders and managements should embrace the “social meaning” of being corporations, Shizuka Kamei told The Times.

In his first interview with the foreign press since being appointed last month — and in his clearest statement yet of economic ideology — Mr Kamei condemned corporate Japan for dismantling the qualities that once made the country great.

“Japan became No 1 in the world and it is an objective and historical fact that Japan achieved that because of a typically Japanese style of corporate management,” he said.

Japanese companies, he continued, had since lost the old spirit of “unity and co-operation” within society, whereby employees were offered jobs for life and profits were distributed between business partners, subcontractors, sub-subcontractors and employees. “I insist that we should return to the traditional Japanese style of management.”

Many investors in Tokyo-listed companies will find Mr Kamei’s comments chilling: Japanese companies are reviled for placing shareholders well down their list of priorities and that stand is now less likely to be reversed. There is also deep concern that it is precisely the archaism and stagnation of Japanese business practices that makes so many companies sluggish competitors against emerging Asian rivals. Mr Kamei’s controversial views have already battered market sentiment: banking shares have crumbled 9 per cent since the former police chief became minister.

It has also deepened the mystery over why the Democratic Party of Japan — endorsed by an election landslide in August — needed to place so minor a coalition ally in a position of such power. Mr Kamei’s attacks on big business, his proposals for a moratorium on bank loans to small and medium-sized companies and calls for the abolition of capital adequacy requirements are, for many investors, coming to define the new Government as a force set against economic revival and growth.

However, in his interview, Mr Kamei was quick to dash any hope that other facets of Western-style capitalism — or, as he put it, the “apeing of America” — could flourish on his watch. “If Washington or anyone else is expecting that sort of thing here, they are totally wrong. Unless the CIA assassinates Shizuka Kamei, I am not going to follow what the US wants.”

He reserved particular contempt for Junichiro Koizumi, the former Prime Minister, whose espousal of market-led reform — though ultimately limited — dragged the country from its “lost decade” of economic slump. Mr Kamei described Mr Koizumi and his ideological partner, Heizo Takenaka, the former Financial Services Minister, as “red-headed stepchildren” in the history of Japan, damaging the country and not fitting its traditions.

Mr Kamei’s forthright attack on what he called “radical market fundamentalism” follows his recent assertion that Japanese companies no longer treated their employees as human beings, and were accordingly responsible for a rise in the levels of murder and suicide.

Proudly, he described to The Times how he had repeated this allegation to Fujio Mitarai, the former chief executive of Canon and now president of the Japan Business Federation. “He just hung his head,” Mr Kamei said with barely suppressed glee. “I don’t think he expected it. I think he was reflecting on what had done.”

In spite of the ferocity of his assault on capitalism, he conceded that socialist or command economies had failed. He was also optimistic in the face of Japan’s savaging at the hands of the global downturn. The country’s huge debt to GDP ratio, at present 170 per cent, was not a problem.

“To put it simply, in modern Japan, the Government doesn’t have any money, but the private sector does. That is how it is. As a whole, and as a country, there is nothing to worry about,” he said.

— Trade to and from China continued its long nosedive in September, but plunged less violently than at any time in the past nine months – a possible sign, said some observers, that the giant economy has been steered into full recovery mode. Growth in business at the country’s largest ports also points to a “nascent recovery” in trade as regional movement of goods staggers back to life after a year in deep freeze, analysts at JPMorgan said.

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