The fellow who'd hailed him there in Shinjuku was one of the most peculiar that Hideaki, 50, had encountered in the months he'd been driving a cab -- since being laid off after years working at a carmaker subsidiary.

This character had a foul mouth, wore a jacket but no necktie and, in short, looked suspiciously like a gangster.

He barked out the destination. Hideaki said sorry, but he'd only recently qualified and didn't know the way.

"That's when the guy went ballistic," recalls Hideaki, a driver with one of Tokyo's largest taxi companies. "He said, 'You call yourself a driver and you don't know the streets? Just drive, dammit!' "

Hideaki (who asked for his family name to be withheld) had done the best he could to avoid just this kind of situation -- mainly by cramming for the 40-question Tokyo-geography exam everyone must pass to become a driver. But as even the brightest, longest-serving professional driver in this city will tell you, it's impossible to memorize every nook and cranny of the capital -- by some measures the biggest urban sprawl in the world. So Hideaki stepped on the gas pedal and hoped for the best.

"All the same, there really wasn't any point," he says. "No matter how much he ranted and raved, I was still lost without his directions."

Scary customers, low pay and shifts up to 24 hours long: Life behind the wheel of a cab has been tough since the economic bubble burst more than a "lost decade" ago. Now,it's getting even worse. Competition is heating up after deregulation went into effect in February, making it easier for new players to enter the business.

The government insists that opening up the transportation industry -- be it taxi services, buses or airlines -- is needed to improve efficiency, and has promised to make the transition smooth by ensuring fair play between companies and the maintenance of safety standards.

Taxi managers, however, complain that deregulation has only made a bad situation worse by creating a glut of substandard services at unreasonably low fares. In Tokyo alone, hundreds of new taxis have hit the streets since February's deregulation.

"It's an exercise in futility," says Shigeru Kawano, president of Aska, a cab company based in Tokyo's Suginami Ward. "With pay already so low, there's no way taxi firms can attract good workers."

A walk down any main thoroughfare -- where fleets of colorful, yet gloomily vacant cabs cruise in search of an elusive fare -- illustrates better than any government report that supply in this industry far exceeds demand. In a country spared bread lines or many beggars in the streets, taxis are perhaps the clearest indicators of its economic distress.

Nowhere in Japan are there more cabs than in Tokyo, which has some 80,000 drivers working for private companies and 20,000 more independent drivers.

A system of six staggered, 18-hour shifts -- the earliest starting at 7 a.m. and stretching all the way to 1 a.m. the next day -- ensures that cars are available round the clock in this 24-hour city.

Despite the prodigious hours, though, much of a taxi driver's working time is wasted either in traffic jams or going to and from the depot. So, as draconian as their regime may seem, most prefer to work these excruciatingly long shifts -- one day on, one or two days off -- so they can spend as much time as possible pursuing customers. Typically in Tokyo, this means a driver will work about 12 shifts a month, often pushing beyond the official 18-hour limit on each in hopes of making more than a mere pittance.

Like all jobs, though, even taxi-driving in an economic slump has its perks -- more often in human-interest terms than financial. Talk to any cabby for a while and you'll soon hear about strange pick-ups they've made, especially late at night. The annals of taxi lore include couples getting hot to the point of boiling back there in full view of the driver's mirror; a former hit man who told his driver how he founded a massage-parlor empire after his syndicate bankrolled him upon his release from prison; and, believe it or not, a ghostly passenger who vanished into a puddle of water before paying the fare.

Timing is of the essence

Unfortunately, though, in the taxi business cash flow can be every bit as unpredictable as the customers, and making money is pretty much a gamble in which cabbies need not just a good strategy, but a fair slice of luck.

Some cabbies opt to stay on the move, cruising likely areas in the hope of being flagged down. These days, too, it's not unknown for some to swallow their pride and stop to ask a group of pedestrians if anyone wants a ride.

A riskier, but potentially lucrative, tactic is to line up outside a downtown office building around midnight and wait for staff heading home to the suburbs. Such long hauls can send the meter up to 30,000 yen or more -- a bubble-eralike windfall in these straited times.

For this method to pay off, timing is of the essence. An unlucky driver may queue for more than an hour only to get a customer who wants to go to the nearest station to catch the last train -- what's dismissed as a "1-meter" ride in taxi drivers' jargon.

Scowl as they may -- and often do -- drivers are required by law to serve a customer, no matter how short the ride -- and unfortunately, such rides are the most common in the current market.

The net result of oversupply meeting depressed demand is that the job of a taxi driver, which used to pay better than a white-collar job, now barely yields a subsistence wage. According to the Tokyo Taxi Association, a driver in the metropolis typically earns about 4.4 million yen a year -- far less than the average 6.7 million yen salary of a male working in the capital.

With so many people competing for scraps, the streets become a battlefield, especially on Monday and Tuesday when trade is at its slackest. Things really get out of hand in the Shinjuku entertainment district, as drivers desperate for customers regularly triple-park in lines hundreds of meters long, in blatant defiance of the law. Not surprisingly, tempers often flare.

Hideaki, our hapless driver with the aggressive fare, says mean-spirited customers are mild in comparison with rival drivers. "There are a lot of rough types working for smaller companies, even ex-yakuza hired back in the days when there was a shortage of applicants," he says. "Those guys go after us top-company people, boxing us in or trying to run us off the road. It's war out there."

Often, too, it's a war with real victims. Whether it's because they take their eyes off the road to search for customers, or because of the sheer exhaustion that accompanies long shifts, taxi drivers find their job is becoming increasingly dangerous. Last year, there were almost 7,500 accidents in Tokyo involving taxis, about twice the number during the peak period of the bubble era. Happily, though, the number of fatal mishaps has declined somewhat.

Restraint on competition

Old-timers say the worsening state of affairs reminds them of the business's chaotic past since the pioneer livery service, Taxi Automobile Co., first dispatched six Model-T Fords to ply the streets around Tokyo's Yurakucho district in 1912. By 1950, with wartime and postwar gasoline rationing repealed, the number of vehicles on the streets soared -- and along with it, the number of incidents of reckless driving.

Years later, when the glut of taxis threatened to completely clog the streets after the 1964 Olympic Games in Tokyo, the government finally moved to limit the number of vehicles taxi companies could operate, according to the Tokyo Taxi Association. The restraint on competition, of course, kept things nice and comfortable for the guys manning the cars, especially during the 1980s' delirious asset-inflated bubble. It was a time when, for example, coddled drivers would routinely turn away foreigners simply to avoid the language gap.

But then, when the champagne lost its fizz in 1991, everything changed. In Tokyo, the annual number of passengers has plunged by about a fifth from 1987, to 347 million last year, with paying customers now aboard for only 4.4 km of every 10 km traveled. No matter how you crunch the numbers, business is bad, and with labor and fuel costs taking a huge chunk out of revenues, February's deregulation is sure to push the weakest companies over the edge.

Amid all the lamentation, though, there are glimmers of optimism that deregulation will also create new opportunities. "This is exactly as it should be," declares Masaaki Aoki. The blustery young businessman is managing director of Tokyo MK Co., whose Kyoto-based parent has taken the industry by storm by offering initial meter charges in major urban centers up to a fifth less than competitors'.

With only a modest 150 taxis, Tokyo MK is still the new kid on the block. Aoki, however, says he plans to have 5,000 cabs on the city's streets within five years. He's confident that by then his cars -- kept immaculately clean by their uniformed drivers, and each equipped with a global positioning system -- will easily outmatch competitors' cars, many of which smell of old socks and tobacco.

But Aoki isn't the only one trying to stand out. Other companies are also giving it their best shot by offering special services to handicapped and elderly passengers, or door-to-door security provided by burly, baton-equipped drivers.

Then there is the remarkable Toshiyuki Anzai, a 60-year-old independent cabbie who ferries jazz aficionados to and from clubs in his white Toyota Crown, which he claims is the only car in the world equipped with a vacuum-tube audio system. Among his most famous fares: legendary singer Helen Merrill and piano greats Chick Corea and Ray Bryant.

If deregulation kills rivals lacking entrepreneurial spirit, then so be it, says Aoki. "They'll pay the price of failure because they haven't tried to innovate," he says. "Deregulation will separate the winners from the losers."

Though the bottom line may sag, and passengers may blow their stacks at times, with national unemployment at a near-record 5.4 percent, some drivers simply take the resigned view that any work is better than none. Among the ranks of Tokyo's cabbies, about a third are men in their 50s, many of whom could find no other work after they lost white-collar jobs due to restructuring.

Even more revealing, almost a tenth of all Tokyo's cabbies once held executive positions in companies, and most are more accustomed to riding a cab than driving one.

One of the many who have switched their seat at a desk for one at a dashboard was Takeshi Sato, 53, a driver of five years who worked at an architectural firm for almost three decades before being laid off.

"It's certainly tough," Sato says with a sigh. "The economy's bad and my salary isn't much. Still, my wife and I can eat."

Sato dreams of one day taking the test to become an independent driver so he can be his own boss. That may be a while coming. Working a taxi driver's hours doesn't leave much time to study for the grueling geography exam he'd have to pass. He tries, however, to look on the bright side of things: There's no supervisor looking over his shoulder, and he can take breaks whenever he wants.

But doesn't his wife miss him when he's out making ends meet?

"Oh, we've been married 32 years," Sato says while nonchalantly dodging pedestrians and cyclists in a side street barely wider than his cab. "At this point, she doesn't care whether I'm sitting around the house or not."

This story originally appeared in a Japan Times package on taxis:

• A woman's life behind the wheel
• Across continents by cab
• London's black-cab elite