LOS ANGELES (MarketWatch) — Japan’s benchmark Nikkei Average opened Monday trade with a 0.5% gain, but by the middle of the afternoon session it was down by as much as 1.5% before trimming some of those losses.

So, instead of re-testing the 18,000 level touched earlier this month as some had expected, the Nikkei Average NIK, +0.17% dropped to the mid-17,000 range. (As of this writing, it’s down 1.1% at 17,628). Volatile action to be sure, though not too surprising given the thin volumes seen this time of year.

What makes Monday’s drop-off a little more interesting, however, is that is comes 25 years to the day that the Nikkei hit its all-time high. And while, for example, the Nasdaq Composite COMP, -0.13% is now within spitting distance of its peak close in March 2000, the Nikkei is not even halfway to where it was a quarter century ago — a close of 38,916 on Dec. 29, 1989.

That peak represented the beginning of Japan’s infamous “Lost Decade,” with the Nikkei Average poised to chop some 15,000 points off its total over the succeeding 12 months. The journey from boom to bust has since been ingrained into Japanese culture, notably commemorated in the 2007 sci-fi film “Bubble Fiction,” in which the Japanese Finance Ministry uses a time machine to send people back to the 80s in an effort to prevent the collapse.

To mark the occasion, The Wall Street Journal has republished a market outlook from January 1990 looking at the tug-of-war between bears and bulls that was going on in Japan at the time.

“For much of the past decade, the world’s biggest stock market [Japan] has stumped the skeptics. Price-earnings ratios are astronomical. The differential between interest rates and corporate earnings is wide. Yet just when the market seems most top-heavy, it heads even higher,” the 1990 report, written by Marcus W. Brauchli, said. (Japan’s stock market is no longer the world’s biggest, now ranking below those of the U.S. and China, according to Bloomberg News.)

Meanwhile, the Nikkei Asia Review is currently featuring a report from this past Friday saying that a plurality of 12 market experts it surveyed believe the Nikkei Average — owned by the news site’s parent company — will surpass 20,000 in the coming year.

“Japanese companies’ pretax profits are expected to mark double-digit year-on-year growth in fiscal 2015, buoyed by an improved Japanese economy and the weakening of the yen against the dollar,” the report says. “Exchange-traded fund investments by the Bank of Japan and stock purchases by the Government Pension Investment Fund are also likely to help the Nikkei Average.”

Whether those experts cited in the Nikkei report are slated for some 1990-style disappointment is, of course, still to be seen. What can at least be said is that the Japanese market faces a much more upbeat situation than it did, say, at the 20th anniversary of the bubble peak.

And so, as MarketWatch’s own way of remembering the Nikkei top, here’s a column from December 2009 by Tokyo bureau chief Lisa Twaronite, looking both at what life was like during the Japanese bubble and how the situation seemed two decades later.