The Nikkei 225 reached its all-time high on December 29, 1989.
The index closed at 38,915.87 at the end of Japan’s extraordinary asset-price boom. Easy credit, rising property values, and strong investor optimism had pushed Japanese shares to historically high valuations. The peak arrived just before the bubble began to deflate.
Japan’s subsequent market decline became one of the longest and most important crashes in modern financial history. The Nikkei fell sharply during the early 1990s and remained far below its 1989 record for decades. The episode is often called the Japanese asset-price bubble, although the stock-market collapse was closely connected to the property market and banking system. The Nikkei 225 is a price-weighted index of 225 prominent companies listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange.