Heisei period, in Japan, the period (1989–2019) corresponding to the reign of Akihito. It began when Akihito ascended the throne on the death of his father, Hirohito (the Shōwa emperor). The two Chinese characters (kanji) constituting the period’s name are translated, respectively, as “peace” and as the root of the verb “to become.” An English equivalent for Heisei is “Achieving Peace.”
The first decades of the Heisei period were somewhat more sober for the Japanese than the last several decades of the preceding Shōwa period (1926–89), which had been the time of Japan’s dramatic recovery and growth into a global economic powerhouse following the country’s disastrous defeat in World War II (1939–45). The Heisei era was marked by turbulent politics (with more than 15 prime ministers within its first two dozen years), a prolonged economic slowdown, and crises in the financial world. A deadly and destructive earthquake in Kōbe and a murderous nerve-gas attack on a Tokyo subway line by members of the AUM Shinrikyo (now Aleph) religious sect (both in 1995) contributed to a generally dark picture during the first several years of the period. The country endured an even more devastating natural disaster in 2011: the catastrophic earthquake and tsunami in northeastern Honshu that also precipitated the Fukushima nuclear accident. Among the events that lifted spirits in Japan were the wedding of Crown Prince Naruhito and Princess Masako in 1993, the 1998 Winter Olympic Games in Nagano, the cohosting (with South Korea) of the 2002 World Cup football (soccer) finals, and the birth of a son to Prince Akishino (the emperor’s younger son) and Princess Kiko in 2006—the first male heir to the Japanese throne to have been born in more than 40 years.