During the 1989 Japanese asset-price crash, the index tracking Japan's leading Tokyo stocks was the Nikkei 225. It is a price-weighted index of 225 prominent companies listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange's Prime Market.
Japan's late-1980s bubble involved rapidly rising land and equity prices, abundant credit, and optimistic expectations. The Nikkei reached its record closing level of 38,915.87 on December 29, 1989. After the bubble burst, Japanese share prices fell for years, while property values and bank balance sheets also deteriorated.
The Nikkei 225 is often used as a shorthand for Japan's stock market, but it is not the country's only major index. TOPIX measures a broader group of Tokyo-listed companies and is weighted by market capitalization. The crash's long aftermath became associated with Japan's “Lost Decades,” although the timing and causes of that prolonged stagnation involve banking problems, deflation, demographics, and policy choices as well as the original asset-price collapse.