Land and Stock Prices in Japan

In late 1991, the total land value in Japan was estimated at nearly $20 trillion. This was more than 20 percent of the world’s wealth, or to put it in some other contexts, about double the world’s equity markets or half again as large as the world’s bond markets. Japanese land was then valued at about five times that of the United States; the land under the Emperor’s Palace, which is about three-quarters of a square mile, was estimated to be worth about the same as all the land in California or in Canada. Real estate assets of Japanese corporations grew by $2.8 trillion from 1986 to 1988, an increase in valuation roughly equal to the size of the Japanese gross national product.