Japan is changing was the message that top Japanese business people wanted to impress on their New Zealand counterparts in Tokyo last weekend as the Kiwis turned up in force for "some rugby diplomacy" and more chin wagging on free trade.

There was a frisson of excitement among senior Japanese players at two bilateral business soirees which took place in the run-up to the historic Bledisloe Cup match.

The toppling of Japan's long-term "natural party of Government" - the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) - has provided an opportunity for Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama's new Japanese Government to slaughter a few sacred cows and to start doing something about the sclerotic nature of the Japanese economy.

But, the business players' appetite for change is over-laden with considerable concern that Hatoyama - who has staked out an ambition to provide an "economy for the people" - has yet to provide a roadmap spelling out just how his Government will keep its campaign promises and rein in snowballing debt that threatens to engulf a fragile economic recovery.

The issue is clearly so top-of-mind for Japanese businesspeople that the question of whether Japan should embark on the type of big-ticket economic reform programmes which took place in New Zealand in the mid-1980s and early 1990s, like central bank independence, was seriously mooted.

But it wasn't Labour's Sir Roger Douglas nor National's Ruth Richardson who were the subjects of Japanese awe. But those well-known economic reformers David Lange and Jim Bolger.

Hatoyama has fingered the Japanese bureaucracy as the villains in a subversive ring which has repeatedly stalled significant economic reform, including any full-blooded attempt to talk free trade deals with New Zealand.

At the Japan New Zealand Partnership Forum, a well-crafted signal was sent that last year's attempt by former Prime Minister Helen Clark to seriously explore an FTA with then Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda's Government was considered a done deal by both political leaders that stalled once powerful Japanese officials decided it was a waste of space tackling vested interests in Japan's agriculture sector.

This time round Prime Minister John Key also found a willing partner in Hatoyama as he used an official state visit to renew Clark's seduction effort.

It is notable that the pair have "instructed" a Japan New Zealand officials group to "deepen discussions in a constructive manner to take the partnership forward".