Tokyo Stock Exchange is the largest stock exchange in Japan and one of the top exchanges in Asia. The Tokyo Stock Exchange (TSE) is an electronic stock market, where traders buy and sell stocks over a computer network, instead of on a trading room floor.
Japan’s first stock market, the Tokyo Stock Exchange Company, Limited, opened for trading in 1878. During World War II (1939-1945), the government of Japan took control of the TSE and Japan’s other stock exchanges, combining them to form the Japan Securities Exchange. Allied air raids on Japan forced all trading to stop in 1945.
In 1947, a law called the Securities and Exchange Law dissolved the Japan Securities Exchange and established separate stock exchanges in Tokyo, Osaka, and Nagoya. The Tokyo Stock Exchange in its modern form began trading in 1949. Eventually, the Japanese cities of Fukuoka, Hiroshima, Kobe, Kyoto, Niigata, and Sapporo also opened stock exchanges. The Tokyo Stock Exchange absorbed the Hiroshima and Niigata stock exchanges in March 2000. In 2013, the Tokyo Stock Exchange merged with the Osaka Securities Exchange under a new holding company called the Japan Exchange Group.