``About 30 degrees. Make sure the collar keeps touching your neck,'' Mitchiru Kuroda yells at the young woman and her fellow students, who silently follow her every instruction before a large mirror.

``Pull in the chin when you bow, don't stick it out. Stay like that for a moment, then straighten out again, but slowly.''

Kuroda is a teacher at the Jal Academy, one of a growing number of staff training schools in Tokyo. In a two-day course, the former air hostess teaches young employees the most basic skills of customer relations, Japanese style: bowing, the ritualised exchange of business cards and the stylised serving of tea.

Politeness, says company department head Reiko Kasai, is ``the grease of Japanese society''. But good manners, she adds, are no longer enough in the recession-plagued country, where people increasingly worry about their jobs, their savings and theirfuture.

Foreign visitors may still be amazed by the involved and highly-cultured courtesy of the sales staff they encounter. But for Japanese, who are long used to being treated like kings in their home country, this is no reason to actually spend money.

``Today sales people have to be able to see things from the customer's perspective,'' says Kasai.

Not formal politeness, but hearty and individual treatment are what truly counts, explains Yoko Sakurai of the rival courtesy school Pasona. ``The Japanese have to learn to look the customer in the eye and smile.''

That is why more and more companies now also send their employees to special smiling courses.

``First you inflate your cheeks to relax them,'' says Kasai, explaining a warm-up exercise. ``Then you say A-E-I-O-U several times.'' Drawing apart the corners of her mouth, she adds: ``Now try a long `whiskeeeey'''.

Other smiling courses go further, making students bite chopsticks and stretch their mouth with special plastic springs for thebroadest, toothiest possible smile.

Women's magazines have also devoted in-depth treatment to the new smiling craze. ``Forget the recession'' the Josei Jishin tells its readers. ``At the end of the millennium, why not become a smiling co-worker?''

Smiling does not only make you feel good, the popular weekly suggests, it also reduces weight and fights cancer.

``I practiced in front of the mirror every day,'' a 23-year-old is quoted as saying. ``At first I found smiling totally unnatural, but then it gave me new confidence.''

``They say the Japanese have unexpressive faces, like the masks in the traditional Noh theatre,'' muses Kasai. ``You can never tell what they think.''

Emotions are indeed seldom expressed openly in Japan, a society which highly values form and harmony. But, in the business world, it is becoming more and more important to read and react to the customers' wishes through open and relaxed contact, says Sakurai.

By how many degrees one bows while doing so, she adds, is ofcomparatively minor importance.