Not exactly. Decades of extraordinarily high growth in postwar Japan culminated in a huge asset price bubble that reached its peak in 1989. When the bubble finally popped in 1990, wiping out billions of dollars in accumulated wealth, the country's growth rates turned anemic. Between 1990 and 2003 Japan dipped into and out of recession. Despite these troubles, though, Japanese GDP in the 1990s ultimately continued to grow at an average of about 1.5 percent per year, measured in real terms. That translates to a 10 percent increase in the size of the economy over the course of the decade, well lower than the much more robust rates of growth in many other industrialized economies during the same period, but hardly a Great Depression. What's more, unemployment never rose over 5.5 percent -- a rate that would be considered quite an achievement in the United States or
