The mythical “Mrs Watanabe” – the Japanise housewife who makes bets on the direction of the yen – has become a symbol, over the past years, of the individual investor dabbling in Tokyo’s foreign currency markets.

By stark contrast, the country’s pension funds and other institutional investors have for the most part kept their distance from these markets, keeping their allocations to the more traditional asset classes of stocks and bonds at home and overseas, with some exposure to alternative investments.