It has taken 33 years — longer than almost all fund managers have been in the industry and indeed longer than some of them have even been alive. But finally, the Japanese stock market is back in business.
The question of course is whether it is going to lead hapless international investors to disappointment yet again. In this regard, one key thing to watch is the yen.
The country’s Topix stocks index this week kept up its slow and steady ascent, and struck its highest point since August 1990. It is still nowhere close to the dizzying heights it struck in the epic Japanese asset bubble of the late 1980s — there’s a cool 25 per cent or so to go before the market is back to that peak.