Matt Frei reports from Seoul

A year ago South Korea had the world's 11th largest economy - then the financial crisis struck. The International Monetary Fund came to its aid with a $58bn loan, but there has been little improvement so far.

Each week, around 10,000 people lose their job, about 90 businesses fail, and in the first three months of the year around 2,300 people committed suicide.

Footmarks in the grease mark the desperation of jumpers

The Han river bridge has seen more suicides than any other in the city of Seoul.

The police try to prevent people from scaling the metal arches for extra height - and therefore a more certain death - with grease.

Etched in the grease is the determination of the desperate. A message scrawled on the pavement below reads simply: "jump".

Suicide has become almost a daily occurrence on the Han River bridge.

In the 24 hours before we arrived three people had jumped to their deaths.

The shame of failure

Homelessness was almost unheard of before the crisis

What has driven them to this is the severity of the economic crisis.

Unlike in the west, where recession produces feelings of anger, despair or outrage against the government, in the Confucian society of Korea it has also produced a deep and personal sense of shame about having lost a job or family savings.

Mr Yang keeps up appearances meticulously. But he dresses for work that he no longer has. In April he went bankrupt and his fertilizer factory employing 27 people closed down.

For two months he was too ashamed to tell his wife.

Hard times

Every morning he commuted to a Seoul park with hundreds of other men also pretending to go to work

Keeping up appearences: Mr Yang travels to 'work'

"I couldn't tell my family the truth, I was the breadwinner," he says. "My son found out when he came to visit at work one day, only to find the factory had closed."

In just eight months the number of unemployed in South Korea has risen four-fold and the number of homeless three-fold.

Bankrupt country

This hospital was given just four hours notice to close

Everywhere is the sense of decline. At one hospital we visited, the nurses took us on a tour of the empty wards: they are empty because the hospital was closed down with four hours notice.

The patients were moved out and the nurses who have not been paid for six months refuse to leave.

Outside they demonstrate in vain. The country is virtually bankrupt.

Elsewhere we found Asia's new Oliver Twists - the IMF orphans - abandoned by their jobless parents because they can no longer afford to feed them in a country with no unemployment benefits.

But their numbers will swell when the industrial giants start laying off millions of parents.