Nikkei 225 · January 15, 2009

The winter earnings gave way

-4.92%

single-day change vs previous close

Part of a longer stretch

Japan's lost decades

near the end of it · 1989-12-29 → 2009-03-10, -81.87% over the whole period

What happened that day?

The Nikkei fell 4.92% to close at 8,023.31. No single trigger for the day could be pinned down
What happened to Japan that winter was a collapse in exports. In a country built on cars and electronics, foreign demand vanished at once
A stronger yen came on top of it. Money fleeing risk piled into the yen, so the same revenue shrank once converted
This market took the global crisis and the currency at the same time. That is why a country far from the epicentre fell so hard
The episode fell 42.86% from the September 2008 high to the March 2009 low
The bottom came nearly two months later, on 10 March

Sources

Every figure on this page is recomputed from the original daily closing prices and checked against them at build time. The account of what happened is put together from the public record; where a specific source was consulted it is listed above.