For 141 years, Toshiba has been one of the faces of Japan Inc: a tireless innovator, a global household name, builder of Asia’s first economic miracle and an incubator of some of the nation’s greatest corporate chieftains.

Satoshi Tsunakawa, grey-suited, cut from cautious “salaryman” cloth and painfully beholden to the company’s biggest lenders, will now administer its downfall.

The 61-year-old Toshiba president and chief executive, who is married with two children, finds himself in charge as years of mismanagement catch up with a company still seen by some as a pillar of the Japanese industrial establishment. To an increasing majority, though, it looks as if it is on the brink of dissolution: broken by a $6.3bn writedown on its nuclear business, crippled by rumours of management dysfunction and deep in financial crisis.