The Japanese stock market was booming at the end of the 1980’s. The Nikkei reached a high of 40,000.

Because of this boom, Japanese companies were among the most expensive companies in the world. This led to a lot of Japanese companies buying up foreign companies. Newsweek came out with this cover in 1987 capturing the zeitgeist of that time. This zeitgeist was later also captured in the movie Die Hard (the company at the center of the movie being Japanese).

Ultimately the bubble burst and Japanese stocks entered a bear market. Stocks crashed almost 90% from the top and the Nikkei reached a bear market low in 2009 during the credit crisis. Japanese stocks are up 350% since then but still almost 50% below the all time high set almost 30 years ago. Japanese stocks to this day have not yet recovered.

One other way that shows how big this bubble was is how large the market capitalisation of Japanese stocks was as a percentage of global stock market capitalisation.