Hopefully it is not a lesson from Japan

I have run a graph like this one before in the column I write for crikey.com.au but today's savage drop in prices on the Tokyo Stock Exchange gives it even more point.
The collective wisdom of financial advisers the world over to their clients is not to get too concerned about these day to day fluctuations in stock prices. Over the long term the movement in share prices, they say, is inexorably upwards.
But just how long is the long term if you happen to be a Japanese investor? Prices today are back where they were 22 years ago. Anyone who bought in to the market in 1987. 1988 and 1989 is now taking a complete bath.
I well remember how the collective wisdom earlier in the 1980s was that Japanese capitalism was showing the rest of the world how things should be done. If only our workers coule be as productive as theirs, our management as good and our governments as clever! Then we would have prosperity in the western world.
Now I wonder whether the Japanese have merely again been at the vanguard of the development of the capitalist system and are showing us that there is nothing inevitable about continued economic growth. Perhaps share markets in the rest of the world are just belatedly following the Japanese pattern. What if the Dow, the FTSE, the ASX 200 et al are about to follow Tokyo's no-growth lead?
That's a concept to frighten a financial adviser trying to clip the ticket and steal an earn from your superannuation investments.