More than one-quarter of the Japanese workers taking part in a survey admitted that the thought of killing their boss had crossed their mind on at least one occasion, underlining the stresses that employees here are often under.

Fully 27 percent of the 1,006 men and women aged between 20 and 69 who responded to the recent survey by Shirabee confessed to having had homicidal thoughts towards a superior - with younger people in particular expressing sympathy for the frustrations and anger that are apparently bubbling just beneath the surface in many Japanese companies.

“I would never kill anyone, but I can understand why so many people are driven to the brink by the way they are treated by their companies”, said Mayao Shibata, a translator from Tokyo.

“I worked part-time in a high-end bistro in central Tokyo for a while and the manager was himself a frustrated 30-something employee who simply did not like me because I was at a good university and going places”, she told The Telegraph. “He made my life miserable; nothing I ever did was good enough.

“If he treated a man like that, then I can imagine things could get violent”, she added.