If there was ever a time for private equity to deepen its foothold in Japan, this should be it. The international credit squeeze has left the country relatively untouched. Assets are cheaper thanks to the recent stock market slump, and shareholders are becoming tetchier – giving managers an incentive to sell underperforming divisions or take their companies private.

Dozens of buy-out funds and billions of dollars in capital have flooded into the market. “On paper, this should be boom times for private equity,” says Iain Drayton, a mergers and acquisitions banker at Goldman Sachs.