Japanese industry suffered a record fall in output in November as unemployment continued to rise and household spending kept sliding, the latest set of gloomy figures from the world’s second-largest economy showed on Friday.

November’s 8.1 per cent month-on-month decline in industrial output, which followed a long series of bad news from Japanese government statisticians, was “particularly striking”, Kaoru Yosano, minister for economic and fiscal policy, told a news conference.