Japan’s Nikkei 225 reached a closing peak of 38,915.87 on 29 December 1989, just before the country’s asset-price bubble burst.
The record reflected a period of extraordinary Japanese property and stock-market speculation during the late 1980s. Share prices had risen dramatically, alongside rapidly increasing land values and abundant credit. The Nikkei’s peak became a widely cited marker of the bubble’s culmination.
After the peak, Japanese equities entered a prolonged collapse. The index fell sharply during 1990, and the broader downturn became associated with Japan’s “Lost Decades” of economic stagnation, banking stress, and deflation. The Nikkei did not regain its 1989 closing high for decades.
The figure is a closing value, not the index’s intraday high. The Nikkei also recorded an intraday peak of 38,957.44 on the same date, which is why both numbers sometimes appear in accounts of the crash.