And yet GDP has more or less risen: http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.CD?locations=JP http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.CD?locations

And yet GDP has more or less risen: http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.CD?locations=JP http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.CD?locations... Its kinda crazy how noisy their GDP is for a country a third the the size of the US. IIRC, one of the theories is that Japan's banking system allows zombie companies that should have been declared failed businesses to survive. In that situation, there's really nothing left to constrain management from rolling the dice on high risk low reward strategies, or worse, not changing the strategy that led them into secret bankruptcy. So to the extent that the Nikkei continues to hold zombie businesses, or the banks that prop them up, it's not a good passive investing benchmark. Which means active investing has a role in filtering them out.