The Nikkei 225 peaked at 38,915.87 on December 29, 1989. The index is Japan’s best-known stock-market benchmark and tracks 225 major companies listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange’s Prime Market.
Its record marked the high point of Japan’s late-1980s asset-price bubble. Extremely rapid increases in land and share prices were supported by abundant credit, optimistic expectations, and speculative investment. When the bubble burst, Japanese equities began a prolonged decline, and the country entered a period often called the Lost Decades.
The Nikkei 225 is price-weighted, meaning companies with higher share prices have greater influence than they would in a market-capitalization-weighted index. That structure distinguishes it from TOPIX, another important Japanese benchmark. The 1989 peak is frequently used as a reference point for the scale and duration of Japan’s market collapse, although the index later recovered and eventually exceeded the old record decades afterward.