ABSTRACT
In Japan, since the mid-1990s, economic globalization has been seen as a more competitive phenomenon. The burst of the so-called ‘bubble economy’ at the beginning of the 1990s triggered an economic crisis – a long recession, an increase in bad loans, a rising unemployment rate and a chain reaction of enterprise bankruptcies. The prices of land and real estate, which rose tremendously during the bubble period, have been falling since the bubble collapsed. The devaluation of real estate properties reflected and amplified the deterioration in the economy. The 1990s came to be referred to as Japan’s ‘lost decade’, and a growing conviction that Japanese strength in the global economy was waning quickly developed.
