Zojirushi Rice Cooker

Some anniversaries are eagerly anticipated, others are recalled with sadness, and yet others would seem to be best forgotten. Twenty years ago this week, Japan’s leading stock market index, Nikkei 225 (that country’s equivalent of the Dow Jones Industrial) reached its historic peak of 38,916 points, a fitting conclusion to the decade that saw the index nearly quadruple during the preceding six years; Japan’s GDP expand at an annual rate of about 4 percent; its currency strengthen beyond anything forecast in 1980 (in January 1980 the exchange rate was 239 yen per U.S. dollar, by December 1989 only 143 yen were needed to buy a dollar); and its worldwide prestige and admiration rising to such unprecedented levels that the fulfillment of Ezra Vogel’s forecast of Japan as number one seemed only a matter of time. (Another anniversary is hiding here, as the first edition of that seemingly so prophetic—but ultimately so utterly failed—bestseller was published by the Harvard University Press in 1979.)