There's one word that has become unexpectedly chic in Japan this year - kechi. It means miserly, niggardly, penny-pinching and downright mean.

It used to be used in a critical way, but now it's a compliment, an attribute of the highest virtue. For Japanese housewives, office workers, teenagers and grannies, it's cool to be kechi.

The reason is Japan's prolonged recession which has seen unemployment reach record highs, banks and famous companies collapse and the yen lose its value.

Stashing cash

Some people no longer trust the banks

But perhaps the most serious effect of the recession in the long-term is that the Japanese people have completely lost confidence in the country's ability to recover. It's brought their kechi instincts to the fore.

Everyone is frantically saving money. It's always been a national strong point, now it's a high art.

Sales of safes have skyrocketed this year as many people feel Japanese banks can't be trusted with their money. Post office savings accounts have also boomed, as the government is seen as marginally more reliable than private institutions.

But many people are simply keeping their cash under the mattress or, in Japan's case, the futon. The national paranoia that the future will be even harder than the present has given birth to a whole new industry devoted to telling the public how to save even more money.

How to be frugal

There's a television programme which teaches viewers how to make dinner for just 50 cents a head. Dishes include soup made from carrot peelings, cheap, but not especially delicious.

Designer labels can be found in second-hand shops

Newspapers and magazines feature canny ways of not parting with your cash. One recent headline read: "How to be kechi".

Second-hand shops have sprung up all around the country. Many Japanese used to have an aversion to wearing cast-offs but now it's fashionable to be frugal.

Some, of course, are very Japanese second-hand shops, stocking only designer labels like Gucci and Yves Saint Laurent.

Kechi Queen

One housewife stands out from the crowd of super savers. Eriko Yamazaki has written a book on the subject, a sober tome called Recommending a Life of Thrift. Her methods are so parsimonious, so ruthless and spartan, that I have crowned her Japan's Kechi Queen.

In the most expensive country in the world, Eriko spends just $75 a month to feed her family of four. She has saved so much she will pay off her $150,000 mortgage in just 5 years. The family's only income is her husband's monthly salary of around $3,800 after tax.

How does she do it? For a start she never buys vegetables but grows everything in her allotment.

She goes shopping by bicycle to save on bus fares and knows where to find all the best bargains in town. She shops in the evening when many shops are discounting food that will be past its sell-by date by the next day.

She makes her own ice cream and mayonnaise and dries her own fish, a staple of Japanese cooking. She saves rainwater to wash the car and shares a bath with her husband to keep the gas bill down.

Living on $75 a month

In winter they only heat one room in their apartment. She of course saves tissues which are given out free as advertising, and never buys washing powder because she gets that as a thank you gift from the newspaper to which she subscribes.

But Eriko says she's not a miser, she's just frugal and spends what she saves on expensive works of art.

Fighting the miserly mania

The government is desperate for the public to start spending again.

Thousands queue for lottery tickets

Next year, it will give families with children and the elderly about $150-worth of shopping vouchers, in the hope that it will spark a consumer boom. But most people say they will simply save their own money and use the coupons for daily necessities.

The miserly mania can't be bought off so easily. But let me tell you my favourite money saving method, which comes from Nagoya, famous as the capital of conspicuous consumption in Japan.

Nagoya has the most expensive subway system in the country, but pensioners get free passes. So families send granny to the shops by subway to get the evening bargains, saving at least $3 a day in fares.