In towns and cities across Japan the distinctive, delirious buildings of the Bubble era still abound: each one telling a tale of how thoroughly excess and exuberance show their age once the fuel is spent.
These were built during Japan’s frothiest days of the late 1980s. More than enough remain to provide ordinary Japanese with daily visual reminders of what bubbly optimism looked like — and, as the buildings have decayed over three decades, its opposite.
The failure of the flawed but widely followed Nikkei 225 stock average to regain its 1989 peak for 34 long years performed a similar function in keeping the trauma of the bubble on permanent public display, impeding a clean psychological exit from the episode.