For decades salarymen like Kanamoto trudged off to work in dark suits, white shirts and neckties. In their leisure time, such as it was, they wore things like blue jeans and T shirts. The fashion landscape between suited and sloppy was uncharted terrain to most of them; “dressy casual” was just another inscrutable Western term. Then, about five years ago, Japanese businesses and government offices began to introduce “casual Fridays”–followed, in many cases, by “casual every day.” The country was beginning to loosen up, particularly in fields like advertising or information technology, where Japanese office workers were becoming almost as casual as their counterparts in the West.

But in Japan, no social change can ever be truly casual. Last Aug. 1, Nissho Iwai Corp., a trading company in Tokyo, switched its male employees from dark suits to a casual everyday dress code. Right on cue, all 30 men in the personnel department showed up in short-sleeve shirts: no jackets, no ties. “It made the office look like a whole different place,” says Tatsuya Hayashi, the department’s senior coordinator. That was the idea. After nearly a decade of recession, some employers were looking for ways to relax their stressed-out workers–and to free them from a traditionally rigid mind-set. “Having everybody wear the same uniform, look in the same direction and believe in the same philosophy worked in the 1960s and ’70s, the era of economic growth,” says Tatsuo Sekine, chairman of CM Research Center, a marketing firm. “That era is long over.”

Before their economic “bubble” burst in 1991, the Japanese tended to believe that the most expensive goods were always the best. Not anymore. Outlet malls are beginning to spring up selling glitzy foreign products at reduced prices. But no quality retailer undersells Uniqlo, a fast-growing discount chain that has made cheap chic the hottest trend in Japanese fashion. The company designs its own products and has most of them manufactured in China. It’s hard to find anything in a Uniqlo store that costs more than $50. In Harajuku, oxford button-down shirts sell for $18; at a nearby Gap store, a comparable shirt goes for $63. Uniqlo’s upscale T shirts cost $18, compared with $27 at the Gap. Uniqlo now has about 460 stores in Japan and plans to build 50 in Britain. “I hope to prove that you can sell the same thing in Tokyo and London at the same time,” says Tadashi Yanai, president of Fast Retailing Co., which owns the Uniqlo brand.

Once they make the switch, most office workers like the casual look. But Hayashi, the personnel manager, stresses the importance of TPO, a term widely used in Japan, standing for the English phrase “time, place and occasion.” To make the point, he opens the locker next to his desk, revealing a black jacket and white shirt hanging there. “You never know,” he says, “when you have to go to a funeral.”