Japan's crazy 1980s bubble a dim memory as Nikkei hits record high

Visitors watch electronic screens displaying Japan's Nikkei share average, which surged past an all-time record high scaled in December 1989, inside a building in Tokyo, Japan on Thursday February 22, 2024. - Reuters

TOKYO (Reuters): As Japanese shares finally reclaim past peaks it harks back to a time when everyone in the country seemed to be a stock market millionaire - a Tokyo car park was worth more than New York's Central Park and the future looked like one endless party.

It is difficult now, after three long decades of deadening deflation, to imagine how truly wild the 1980s' bubble was in Japan, and how speculation upended its strait-laced culture.