Stats › Global markets and exchanges › Nikkei 1989
The Nikkei and the 1989 bubble
At the end of 1989 the Japanese stock market was the largest in the world and looked unstoppable. Then it stopped. It took thirty four years and two months to close above the level it reached that December, which is why Japan gets brought up in every serious conversation about bubbles and why it's worth understanding properly rather than as a punchline.
This page is the record. The peak, the trough, the recovery, where the index sits now, and how much of the famous bubble folklore survives being checked. That last part took the longest to assemble. Some of the stories everybody repeats can't be traced to any source at all, and there's a contemporaneous version that makes the same point and can be traced properly. The land bubble gets a section of its own, because the equity collapse everybody quotes was actually the smaller half of the story.
Five sources sit behind this and they don't all agree with each other. Where they conflict I've said so in the note instead of picking a winner, and a couple of figures couldn't be confirmed at all, which is also written down. Everything is linked with its date. Given how much of the 1989 material is second hand, I'd treat any single number from that era, including the ones here, with more suspicion than you'd normally bother with.
The Nikkei 225 closed at 38,915.87 on 29 December 1989 and did not close above that level again until 22 February 2024, a gap of thirty four years and two months. The post bubble low was 7,054.98, an 81.9% decline. The index closed at 64,362.02 on 31 July 2026, which is 65% above the 1989 peak and works out at roughly 1.4% a year in price terms over 36.6 years. Japan held about 45% of world equity market capitalisation in early 1989 and is 5.69% of MSCI ACWI today.
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Below this point there are 8 sections, 1 chart and 5 named sources, roughly 1700 words of it. Every figure carries the source it came from and the date the data is from.
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