Last Time the Nikkei Was This High, Japan Was Still Seen Rising

The last time the benchmark Nikkei 225 Stock Average closed around 23,000 yen was weeks after the release of Michael Crichton’s "Rising Sun," the novel about a Japanese conspiracy to take over America.

In retrospect, the book was emblematic of the confidence in Japan’s prospects at the time. Those of us working in Tokyo in the early 1990s have plenty of examples of mass enthusiasm for the country’s future -- enthusiasm that had disappeared by 1997, when Japan was clearly engulfed in an economic malaise that would eventually stretch into its famous lost decades.