Japan’s Stock Market Is Finally Back to 1990 Levels

Buoyed by a wave of buying from overseas, including the stamp of approval from legendary investor Warren Buffett, Japan’s economic outlook is brightening, deflationary concerns are dissipating, and the stock market is on a climb that could take it above its all-time record highs. It only took 33 years.

On Dec. 30, 1989, Japan’s premier market index, the Nikkei 225, closed at 38,915.87, capping a year that saw a 29 percent rise and an amazing 15-year climb that helped to put Japan at the center of the global economic map. But in 1990, it fell 39 percent, marking what is now known as the end of the so-called bubble economy. The sharp fall that year was far from the end. Despite numerous attempted rallies over the years, the market was on a long and seemingly inexorable fall, hitting just 7,054.98 points in March 2009. Over 20 years, the market had fallen 82 percent.

The latest rally shows how far the market has come back, with valuations now up more than 370 percent from the 2009 nadir. And it may have a long way to go yet. While Tokyo, as of mid-June, remains 13 percent below its 1990 high-water mark, in the same time period the FTSE 100 in London has risen 213 percent, and the Dow Jones Industrial Average has soared 1,146 percent. No wonder investors are now seeing opportunity in Japan, since just catching up to the rest of the world would represent potentially large gains.

One of the main drivers in the market’s climb is a surge in inflation that started with the shortages and higher commodity prices of the COVID-19 pandemic. While the higher external costs have been a headache for all major economies, in Japan they quickly produced what a decade of monetary easing had failed to achieve: demand-driven inflation where wages and prices both rise. After nearly three decades of deflationary price pressures, Japan’s inflation rate has quickly climbed from near-zero levels to 4 percent. While that is still subdued by global standards, it is still the highest since September 1981. “A cycle between inflation and wages is finally emerging in Japan. I think this is a structural change in the economy,” said Kentaro Koyama, Japan chief economist for Deutsche Bank.

This is exactly what former Bank of Japan Gov. Haruhiko Kuroda vowed to create when he took office in 2013. He quickly undertook a bond and equity buying spree that left the central bank holding 50 percent of all the Japanese government bonds in circulation and becoming a major holder of stocks. The target he set was a consistent 2 percent inflation rate that would be seen in both prices and wages. After 10 years in office, making him the longest-serving Bank of Japan governor in history, but with little sign of numbers moving, his goal finally came into sight just as he stepped down earlier this year.

Even Japan’s stingy employers, which have offered near-guaranteed job security but little extra cash over the years, are now pushing up wages at their highest level in 30 years. Japan’s Trade Union Confederation this spring won a 3.8 percent increase for its nearly 7 million members. Medium- and small-sized businesses are now seeing that they need to keep up to avoid losing people.

Another attraction is the health of Japan’s corporate sector. While the global dominance of companies such as Sony, Panasonic, Japan Steel Works, and Toshiba is long gone, major corporations have remained highly profitable, finding specialist areas that offer strong profit margins. Instead of producing the electronic goods or even the computer chips that drive them, Japanese companies have done well in a globalized economy with specialist products, ranging from the chemicals needed to make the chips to the industry-leading motion sensors needed for a robotic work floor.

But experienced Japan watchers might feel a twinge of disquiet. Ever since the mid-1990s, when it became clear there were serious structural issues in the economy, there have been a series of “Japan is back” declarations, with the fizzling of initial rosy forecasts giving way to declarations that “this time is different.” Stock market rallies in 1996, 2000, and 2007 all gave way to renewed bear markets. Promises that corporate Japan had now changed and was serious about rewarding shareholders instead of hoarding cash also seemed to be more talk than action. Retained earnings have risen steadily, reaching 242 trillion yen ($2.2 trillion) in 2020.

But even some veterans who have seen it all before are much more optimistic today. “Japan is back,” said Tokyo strategist Nicholas Smith of the Asian financial services firm CLSA. In a report to clients in May, he said that strong earnings and attractive valuations have now been kickstarted by a new drive coming from regulators and the Tokyo Stock Exchange to push up share prices through stock buybacks. This cooperation is coming together in a way he has not seen in 35 years of watching the Japan market. “Japan’s market is still very much more than just cheap. It has growth when others haven’t, due to belated reopening; it’s awash with cash, driving some eyepopping buybacks,” he said in the report.

Helping this along, Smith said, is the involvement of once-shunned activist investors. His data shows that Japan is now the No. 2 market for activists in the world, after the United States. When the firms, including major international names, first saw opportunities in Japan in the early 2000s, they were often derided as hagetaka, the Japanese word for vultures. But after some high-profile agreements with corporate titans such as Toshiba and Olympus, the mood has changed. Well-known names such as the Carlyle Group and Bain Capital are active in Japan, along with some home-grown Japanese firms that often work from offshore.

The other big recovery has been in real estate values, which had plunged at the same rate as stocks in the 1990 collapse. Foreign investment is pouring into the sector as investors look at prices little-changed over the past 30 years, made even cheaper by a weaker Japanese yen, which has fallen 20 percent over the past two years. According to the Numbeo international cost-tracking website, apartment purchase prices in Tokyo are around half the price of the equivalent space in New York.

As depressingly often with economic developments, the boom has left one group out of the party: the average Japanese person, especially the estimated 88 percent who do not own shares. And while wages are rising, the gains are being outstripped by inflation.

“The current situation is a very good tailwind for risk assets. Real estate valuations are being helped by low interest rates. But will it help the average Japanese person? To be honest, I don’t think so,” said Deutsche’s Koyama.

He cites government data showing that even as wages are rising, inflation is one step ahead. According to the Labor Ministry, Japan’s inflation-adjusted real wage index fell 3 percent in April from a year earlier, the 13th consecutive month of declines.

Part of the problem, he said, is that wages are raised only annually, in many cases through the spring labor negotiation season, while prices rise continuously.

Unless, of course, people change jobs, an idea that is alien to traditional Japanese workers. But with Japan’s labor force now shrinking and demand for employees rising, the younger generation has taken to job hopping, which can easily add 10-20 percent to salaries.

The demand is clearly there, with 1.3 jobs for every job seeker, according to the Labor Ministry. (For those in construction, there are nearly 12 jobs per person.) The problem is that with one of the world’s fastest-shrinking populations, Japan is starting to face critical labor shortages, and the problem is expected to worsen.

This could undermine another potential area of growth for Japan from the new drive for economic security and the decoupling from China, which is now more politely called de-risking. While investment flows are typically slower to change than trade due to the long lead times involved, foreign investment into China was down 7 percent, at $76.7 billion, in the second half of 2022.

“The simple story of foreign business retreating from China is overdone and often just wrong. But neither is there a stampede back to China now that the mood music has become more positive,” Andrew Cainey, a senior associate fellow with the Royal United Services Institute in London, said in a commentary for Japan’s Nikkei.

With companies now increasingly nervous about their prospects in China, Japan is burnishing its credentials as a rule-of-law country that also offers solid infrastructure, a good lifestyle, and surprisingly low costs. Tokyo, which was for decades was ranked the most expensive place for foreigners, now scrapes in at No. 19, according to the latest Mercer ranking of cities by cost of living.

It’s not that costs have come down significantly; instead, they have gone up everywhere else. Japan’s newfound status as a low-cost destination is the natural result of 30 years of near-zero inflation. The longer-term problem is how to find the people to fill the jobs needed for any new boom period. But for now, foreign investors seem unconcerned. The bargains are just too good to pass up.