It is, on the face of it, merely a supremely ambiguous phrase of bureaucratic Japanese — but it is threatening to plunge the country's welfare system into chaos and create a national “fire sale” of everything from violins to motorbikes.

Trying to make sense of it are the burgeoning ranks of unemployed Japanese seeking to tide themselves over with money provided by the State. Their task: to pare down their lives so that their homes contain only “reasonable items”. Their problem: nobody knows what constitutes “reasonable”.

Here lies a grey area that places huge discretionary powers in the hands of the welfare inspectors, many of whom will not even hand out the application form if they believe that the benefit-seeker possesses any “luxurious” items that may be sold for hard cash.

Thus applying for welfare in Japan is much like declaring personal bankruptcy in the West. Musical instruments, cars, jewellery and a selection of non-specific “unnecessary” household electronics must be sold or the State's coffers will remain closed. At its worst, the benefit regime could provoke a severe collapse in living standards for households where the main breadwinner has lost his or her job.

To receive welfare cheques, all life insurance policies must be cancelled and applicants must show that they have total bank deposits valued at less than half the size of their monthly benefit. Air conditioners are deemed acceptable, but that is only a recent dispensation after a furious public outcry over the treatment of an elderly woman. Cars, motorcycles and other vehicles may be maintained only by benefit-seekers able to prove — beyond doubt — that they could not realistically find a new job without the means of personal transport.

Televisions are viewed as “reasonable”, but wait: this is true only if the screen is not too luxurious in size, too big in layman's terms. The bizarre debate over the precise measurement differences between “acceptable” and “excessive” is expected to rage fiercely in welfare offices throughout Japan.

The forecast of widespread confusion and disarray, described last night by MPs within the ruling Liberal Democratic Party, came as record numbers of Japanese are applying for state welfare benefits. In the past, one MP told The Times, Japanese would have applied for livelihood assistance only as a last resort, mainly because there always seemed to be the prospect of another job. “Now those prospects appear to be diminishing every day, people feel they have no other choice.”

January's 30 per cent rise in applications represents a deluge of financial neediness that Japanese society never expected and the system was never built to support. Although the number of households surviving on the “livelihood assistance programme” — the dole — is low by international standards, the 1.2 million figure reportedly reached in January set a record that economists expect to be beaten with each month as the year wears on.

Japan, the world's second-largest economy, has suffered from the global downturn on several fronts: the collapse of the American and European markets has destroyed exports, while financial mayhem has caused the yen to strengthen with unprecedented speed and in a way that has left even the country's strongest industrial players facing floods of red ink.

Jobs have been slashed to keep pace with the rout: the Government estimates that about 158,000 contract workers will have lost their jobs between last October and the end of this month, about twice the figure it was forecasting eight weeks ago.

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