Weirdly, Akio Toyoda, scion of the Toyota family, summed it up rather well. “Believe me, Toyota's car is safety,” the chief executive of Japan's most iconic company said. “But we will try to increase our product better.”

It would normally be unforgivable to mock someone's difficulties in English. But the fact that Mr Toyoda, who earned an MBA in the US, had not been drilled in a word-perfect English apology says much about Toyota's sub-quality response to its recall crisis. In Japan, the apology, like ikebana and haiku, is an art form. Yet as recently as last Friday, when the Toyota chief made his tangled mea culpa, the company was still failing to address the concerns of its customers, 70 per cent of whom live outside Japan.

Watching Toyota's slow-motion pile-up is like witnessing the sequel to Japan Inc's own car crash in 1990 when an economic model, hailed as invincible by management gurus, plunged over a cliff. Then, as now, an obsession with market share led companies to expand too rapidly. Now, as then, legendary business practices – in Toyota's case its just-in-time processes and its kaizen philosophy of continuous improvement – had hidden flaws.