The best Japanese estate agents can tell the exact age of an apartment block by the height of the ceilings. Recessions mean shorter girders and more floors: the closer a building dates to 1972, 1983 or 1998, the lower the head space.

It's a good parlour trick, and a daily reminder that financial crises, market meltdowns and recessions quickly stop being about trading screens covered in red numbers and come to be measured in square footage, elbow room and quality of life.

In Japan since 1990, the psychological impact of post-bubble reality on the people stooped under those low ceilings has been even more fundamental. The land of the rising, then setting, then insipidly shining sun is proof that financial crises and their aftermath mess quite comprehensively with a nation's head. Britain should prepare for the same rough journey of the soul.

Economists can argue about whether the collapse of the Japanese bubble and the 2008 implosion are exact parallels, but so far it all seems to be running like the same Greek tragedy. Japan did hubris, suffered catastrophe and had to rely on the deus ex machina of state bailouts for banks. Then, when the audience had gone home, the entire set had to be slowly and painfully dismantled.

It's the bit after the main performance that is so instructive. Because, despite a few surface continuities such as karaoke, bowing while talking on the phone and noisily slurping noodles, the intra- and post-bubble Japanese outlook on life are almost incomparable.

In the few years after Japan's - actually fairly brief - late 1980s economic bubble, the very core of what it meant to be Japanese changed direction decisively, and by no means all for the worse.

The supposed essentials of “the Japanese way of business” - concealment of emotion, job-for-life culture, pressure for home ownership, even the respectful choreography of exchanging name cards - turned out to be wholly dispensable conceits.

After its 16-year boom, Britain (especially London) has amassed a much larger collection of conceits that will surely perish. The Japanese obsession with Cuban cigars was comically short-lived. Is London really a city that eats sushi for lunch, and is picky about coffee beans, or just one that has recently been able to afford that appearance?

After the bubble, street-level philosophy changed even more starkly for Japan. Views on economic right and wrong swerved left: the leniency extended to the banks soon morphed into a sense that ordinary companies and individual borrowers were owed mercy. The Government borrowed heavily to make that happen, and the British Government has begun to do the same.

Profit was OK, but excess profits became faintly disgusting. Companies took to hiding their success - not by stashing the loot in dodgy offshore subsidiaries to cheat the taxman, but by paying back creditors earlier than necessary. The idea of the shareholder as deserving more attention and reward than employees or customers quickly withered.

Belief in the fast buck - via property or stock investment - was stripped from public consciousness and replaced with a mass conversion to the religion of tortoise v hare. Bubble-phobia became the underlying policy of successive Cabinets and anything resembling one was crushed by legislation. A society that thought of itself as socially homogeneous suddenly started identifying “winners” and “losers” - categories directly related to who kept or lost their jobs. The education system lost its power to act as a guarantee. Tokyo taxi drivers had engineering degrees, and waiting lists for cramming schools tripled.

Japanese instinctively hoarded cash for a rainy day: financially and philosophically, companies and the general population began carrying umbrellas even when the forecast was good. Household risk aversion now commands cultish devotion: books about living on a fiver a day sell in millions, and TV programmes on the theme are primetime fare.

Consumerism was transformed into something wholly different as the public embraced the creed of itten gokashugi - the “selective extravagance-ism” of splashing out on one thing, and spending astoundingly little on everything else.

Chains of upmarket second-hand stores suddenly arose for a public no longer obsessed with novelty and pristineness. People stopped replacing gadgets at lightning speed. Products that were stylish but unreliable lost their cachet - it will be interesting to see how the iPod fares in that context.

Japanese companies became the most energy-efficient on Earth, and their cars, lavatories, washing machines, televisions and air-conditioners more so. Greenness became a critical corporate prerogative, not an annoying chore.

But through it all, the country retained its creative panache: from Tokyo's battery of the world's best restaurants to Pokémon and Oscar-winning animation. PlayStation, the Nintendo DS, the Wii and the Tamagotchi were all post-bubble inventions.

And it may have taken 18 years to achieve, but a 6ft man can now walk though a Japanese doorway without crowning himself.

Leo Lewis is Asia business correspondent of The Times

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