In the penultimate episode of the Revised Introduction to Japanese History: the 1980s sees the rise of Japan’s asset bubble and the peak of the high-rollin’ postwar. But the new prosperity is built on faulty ground that is already beginning to creak…

Sources

Pempel, T.J. Regime Shift

Anchordoguy, Marie. Reprogramming Japan

Werner, Richard. Princes of the Yen

Kingston, Jeff. Japan in Transformation, 1945-2010.

Images

A graph from Nakaso Hiroshi’s paper showing the fall in Japan’s economic growth rate after the bubble.Japan’s unemployment rate has spiked since the bubble; it still remains low compared to other industrialized countries, but the effects on Japanese society have been substantially disruptive.Another shot of the Ginza in the 1980s. By the height of the bubble, one square meter of commercial real estate here cost $750,000.The grounds of the Imperial Palace in downtown Tokyo. According to some estimates, during the height of the asset bubble this ~2 square mile area was worth more than the entire state of California.