This is the script of CNBC's news report for China's CCTV on March 11, Monday.
Welcome to CNBC business daily.
It has been two years since the twin disasters struck Japan. The Nikkei has finally returned to pre-disaster levels. Here's recap of the Japanese benchmark since the incident.
On Monday March 14, 2011 the market got its first chance to react and plunged in the first few minutes of trade. Over the next 2 days, the Nikkei 225 tumbled nearly 17% despite the central bank flooding money markets with emergency funding to the tune of nearly 700 billion dollars.
On March 18, Japanese stocks jumped after the G7 pledged joint intervention to weaken the yen.
But the index continued to move lower over the next six months as crippled supply chains choked the manufacturing sector.
Then, another hit to stocks, this time from abroad - S&P stripped the US of its triple A credit rating in early August, sending the Japanese benchmark below the 9 thousand level.
By the end of 2011, investors also had to contend with fears of the Eurozone debt crisis. Things finally turned around last November... speculation that Shinzo Abe and the LDP would return to power kicked off a big rally in Japanese stocks and a weaker yen.
A day after Abe was confirmed as PM, the index rose above pre-disaster levels for the first time since the twin disasters.
Abe's aggressive stance on monetary policy, along with his pick of like-minded Haruhiko Kuroda as the next Bank of Japan governor has helped push the Nikkei 225 up nearly 40% since then.
The yen has tumbled 20% in the same period. And then on Friday, the Nikkei returned to levels not seen since the collapse of Lehman brothers.
With markets back at pre-Lehman levels, is the rally sustainable and how weak will the yen get?
[Sound on tape by Yoshito Sakakibara, Executive Director, Investment Research, JPMorgan: During the last several years, what hurt Japanese market so much is that international risk aversion kind of trend. That also brings in strong pressure. It's actually quite important to have the yen strength corrected over the last few months.]
[Sound on tape by Simon Warner, Head Of Macro Markets, Amp Capital: If anything, the domestics have been selling. We're seeing that in some of our own retail funds, with Japanese investors taking profit on lower yen. Therefore, I don't think there's really any change in domestic psyche or in underlying expectations in the Japanese economy yet.]
[Sound on tape by John Horner, Fx Strategist, Deutsche Bank: Our expectations have been that we get to 100, probably later in the year rather than sooner.]
[Sound on tape by Andy Xie, Independent Economist: Abe is just helping the speculators. But I think the USD/JPY is over-shooting in the short term - it's not really from the Japanese companies.]
Li Sixuan, from CNBC's Asia headquarters.