Optimists have spent the last 30 years heralding Japan’s rising sun, yet midday never quite seems to come. The Nikkei 225 stockmarket index peaked at just below 39,000 in late 1989; today it still sits at 32,700. There have been bouts of enthusiasm along the way, but they soon fizzled out.
The Nikkei jumped by more than 40% between late 1999 and March 2000. Following the dotcom collapse, it rose by more than 50% between 2004 and 2007 before succumbing to the global financial crisis. After 2012 the Nikkei more than doubled in the early years of former prime minister Shinzo Abe’s “three arrows” campaign to revive the Japanese economy. International funds flooded in, but foreigners ultimately sold out as the promised growth remained elusive.
The 1980s bubble economy was “a period of ostentatious consumption and overconfidence in the infallibility” of corporate Japan, says Justin McCurry in The Guardian. When the party ended, Tokyo’s bureaucrats had “no idea how to clean up the mess left by absurdly high share and property prices”. Procrastination only prolonged the gloom. “It took until 2002 to bail out the banks... It took another ten years to put the necessary supply-side and social-security reforms in place,” says
