Nomura has persuaded half of its jobs-for-life Japanese investment bankers to give up their local contracts and adopt more volatile western deals, in the mould of the Lehman Brothers operations it acquired last autumn.

In his first foreign interview, Kenichi Watanabe, Nomura's chief executive for just over a year, told the Financial Times that “more than 50 per cent” of the 1,600 investment bank staff in Japan had filled out registration forms for Lehman-style contracts that would cut their basic pay and make them easier to sack, in exchange for potentially higher performance-related bonuses.

The drive runs counter to western governments' and regulators' efforts to contain investment banks' red-blooded bonus culture, widely blamed for encouraging the excessive risk-taking that led to the global financial crisis.