Michael Woodford of Olympus. Sir Howard Stringer of Sony. Craig Naylor of Nippon Sheet Glass. The cavalcade of foreign executives to leave the helm of Japanese companies in recent months is long. Shorter is the list of those who remain. Easily the most famous of whom is Carlos Ghosn, the Brazilian-born French businessman who still heads Nissan after coming to Japan a decade ago. No wonder people have started calling him Ghosn Alone.

The parade of departures – Mr Woodford’s after helpfully exposing a $1bn fraud – has given the impression that corporate Japan is retreating from the world. A word one hears a lot in Tokyo these days is uchi-muki (inward-looking) to describe the phenomenon of a country drawing in on itself.

But look at corporate Japan and this impression has one slight flaw: it is the exact reversal of the truth. Foreign executives may be leaving Japan but Japanese ones are flocking abroad. They may not be making the splashy deals that grab headlines. Yet Japanese companies are second only to those from the US in making foreign acquisitions. In the first five months of 2012 alone, according to Dealogic, Japanese companies spent $35.4bn on foreign targets. That puts them on track to equal last year’s record of $83.7bn. This year, Japanese companies have accounted for 11 per cent of all cross-border deals by value, against 9 per cent for 2011 and just 2-3 per cent for most years in the past decade.