Nikkei 225 · April 28, 2003

The day it fell back to 1982

-1.19%

single-day change vs previous close

Part of a longer stretch

The twenty-year low

near the end of it · 2002-05-23 → 2003-04-28, -36.49% over the whole period

What happened that day?

The Nikkei 225 moved 1.19% on the day, at one of the lows of the twenty-year decline since the bubble
The index was back at its 1982 level — twenty years of gains erased
The problem was still the banks. Recognising and resolving their bad loans had been deferred for more than a decade
That May public money went into a large bank and the market turned. It confirmed the government would see it through
The recovery that began here ran to 2007 and more than doubled the index
How long it took to admit and resolve the structural problem is what explains this country's twenty years

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 written from the sources listed above.