ABSTRACT
In the early 1980s, an investment boom referred to in Japan as zaiteku first started among corporations. It spread to the general population and came to be known as the “money game”. It was only when the money game collapsed and ended that people began to call it the bubble. Land, protected by the “myth” that it would never lose value, was not just utilized as collateral. A commodity that would never lose value was obviously looked upon as an investment in itself; enormous amounts of capital were invested in land as commodity. The role played by the large construction companies cannot be forgotten in any discussion of the architectural culture of the bubble era. The construction companies made huge profits because of the enormous volume of construction work in that era and the high profitability of that work. In the 1920s New York was hit by a bubble much like the one that visited Japan in the 1980s.
