While rival banks sit on their deposits, frustrating the government efforts to reflate a stagnant economy, regional banker Takashi Tsuchiya will write you a loan to close your business or end your marriage.
The portly boss of Ogaki Kyoritsu Bank (OKB) in Gifu Prefecture, who deploys an infectious giggle as liberally as he disburses loans, sees opportunities in borrowers that most of Japan's reluctant regional lenders would dismiss as dead ends.
Such "curtain call" loans can lift customers from the wreckage of their private lives, but for Tsuchiya, it's a creative way of supporting the nation's sluggish regional economies, where low birth rates and internal migration are hollowing out small towns and villages and squeezing his bank's margins.