Mr Takayuki Tabata (26) is young, confident, intelligent and is about to do something that would have been unthinkable just a decade ago. After less than three years with one of Japan's top electrical machinery firms, Mr Tabata is looking for a new job.

The computer systems engineer and graduate of Tokyo's prestigious Chuo University is one of a growing number of job-hopping youngsters who are selling their labour to the highest bidder. "People with experience are jumping around to get better salaries and better stock options," says Mr Anthony Moore, a consultant for the East West employment agency, which headhunts talent for foreign firms in Japan.

About one-fifth of Japan's employees used to work for firms that provided jobs guaranteed for life. But not any more. Last year, according to the labour ministry, more than one-third of companies were engaged in what is euphemistically termed labour adjustment and almost all are disavowing the idea of the permanent job.

With unemployment hovering at record levels of under 5 per cent, the jobs market in Japan remains tight overall, but information technology workers like Mr Tabata can have their pick of positions.

Of the 36 workers hired by the IT section of Mr Tabata's firm two-and-a-half years ago, 11 have already gone. Most, like Mr Tabata, simply sought jobs with better pay.

And they can get it. Mr Moore says that a 25-year-old computer engineer in telecommunications giant NTT could expect to almost double his salary to as much as 6 million yen (£50,000) by moving to a foreign company in Tokyo whose salary scale is based on skills rather than age.

In the world's most expensive city, £50,000 is not a fortune, but it is enough to lure young workers in a country where most salaries are still based on seniority.

Such job hopping creates a headache for Japanese companies who usually take on inexperienced recruits from school or college and pour resources into training them. Mr Tabata happily admits that the skills which make him highly employable were all learned on the job. But Japanese firms have only themselves to blame for the talent drain. Their rush to do away with lifetime employment, which effectively guaranteed worker loyalty, has been unseemly. Though companies going through restructuring will never mention the word "sacking" and Japanese labour law remains strong enough to protect workers against random dismissal, many firms, including those in the Hitachi, NEC and Mitsubishi groups, have aggressively cut payrolls.

Some unwanted workers are enticed by the carrot of a generous early retirement package.

Others are simply bullied into resigning. The Japanese media in recent years has featured alarming stories of unwanted middle managers being sent up mountains to spend their days cutting wood in an effort to humiliate them into resigning.

Last year, a sharp rise in suicides by older men, mainly attributable, say experts, to the economic downturn, drove the average male life expectancy down for the first time since the second World War.

The feeling of insecurity is widespread. A recent government survey showed that 50 per cent of workers fear losing their jobs, up from 29 per cent six years ago.

This insecurity pushes people toward the booming job recruitment agencies. Mr Jonathan Gibbard, a consultant with recruitment firm JAC Japan, claims his firm has 28,000 people on its rolls who want to move jobs. Many of them, he says, are motivated to do so by the ending of lifetime employment.

It remains to be seen whether the job-hopping trend will expand to smokestack industries, many of which are showing signs of recovery from the crippling economic slump of the 1990s. But if it does, this will not be the first time big Japanese firms have faced such a problem. At the beginning of this century, manufacturers were plagued by a high employee turnover at a time when agitating workers were looking for better conditions.

Firms succeeded in establishing workplace stability, according to Harvard University History Professor Andrew Gordon, by inventing the idea "that Japan possessed a unique tradition of paternalistic management of labour based on warm master-servant relations."

But now in Japan, as Western management theories gain the ascendancy, the myth of the corporate family is finally being laid to rest.