A decade ago, senior American officials regularly travelled to Tokyo to deliver sermons on how to handle a banking crisis. Back in 1998, Japan was facing painful financial upheaval and economic stagnation in the wake of an asset price crash.

Many Washington and Wall Street gurus were convinced they knew how to fix this mess – partly because America had recently experienced its own banking crisis at the end of the 1980s, centred around savings and loans institutions. “People like Larry Summers [then US Treasury secretary] would fly over and say “do this!”, recalls one senior Japanese financial official. “They kept telling us to use public money for the banks.”