The Salaryman

For the past decade, Shojiro Suzuki has watched his wealth slowly slip away. The 861-sq.-ft. house in Tokyo that he bought 13 years ago for 60 million yen ($492,000)? It's worth half that now. The stock portfolio worth 16 million yen ($131,000) back in the late 1980s? A paltry 3 million yen ($25,000) now. His salary of 8.5 million yen ($70,000)? The same for 10 years. To make matters worse, last week the stock ticker in his office's front window taunted him every time he walked by. On his way out Monday, it was at 12,171, its lowest point since the mid-1980s. By 9:30 a.m. Tuesday: 11,710. On Thursday on his way to lunch: 11,800. "We're in a vicious spiral now," Suzuki says.

A pale man with graying hair and an easygoing smile, Suzuki has spent his entire adult life at his firm, working from 8 a.m. until 10 p.m. daily. He joined the company out of high school, in 1974, drawn to the firm because it managed his father's portfolio. "This is more serious, much worse than when the bubble burst," Suzuki says, referring to 1990, when the bottom fell out of Japan's stock market. "We cannot see any future."

He stopped going out for drinks with his colleagues a long time ago. He doesn't buy a new suit until he wears a hole in an old one. He is worried that if the company decides to drop its twice-a-year bonuses, as other firms have, he won't be able to make his house payments. "Even when the economy does recover, things may not be that much better," Suzuki says. "We're never going back to the good old days."

T.L./Tokyo