Sir Howard Stringer looks comfortable enough sat in his soft armchair in the Tokyo headquarters of Sony, the Japanese icon he has been charged with hauling back from the brink. But from where he sits, the first foreigner to head Sony feels trapped between the Scylla of America and the Charybdis of Japan.

Explaining why his mid-term restructuring plan, announced to sceptical market response on Thursday, did not go as far as he might have wanted, he says: “There's a cultural divide. The Japanese investors say don't touch headcount, the western investors say I haven't done enough. I wanted to escape [Thursday's announcement] with as little damage as I could get away with because I knew I was trapped.”