Orders now silently processed in milliseconds were shouted across smoky open outcry trading floors. Yuriko Koike, now Tokyo’s Governor, was a fresh-faced TV presenter on the country’s leading business news show. The U.S. fretted over “Japan as number one,” while China was an economic backwater.That’s how long it’s been since the Nikkei 225 passed 30,000, an event which first took place in December 1988. With the index crash in 1990 that followed the deflating of the asset-price bubble, it would take more than three decades for the benchmark to regain that height.“Sometimes it took an hour or two just to execute an order,” Taketsugu Agari, a 51-year-old veteran trader and investor, remembers of those days. He began his career in 1988 as a “batachi” — the traders who used complex hand gestures to communicate buy and sell orders across deafening trading floors. “Now you can just do it yourself on your phone.”