  The persistence phenomenon is studied in the Japanese financial market by
using a novel mapping of the time evolution of the values of shares quoted on
the Nikkei Index onto Ising spins. The method is applied to historical end of
day data from the Japanese stock market during 2002. By studying the time
dependence of the spins, we find clear evidence for a double-power law decay of
the proportion of shares that remain either above or below ` starting\rq\
values chosen at random. The results are consistent with a recent analysis of
the data from the London FTSE100 market. The slopes of the power-laws are also
in agreement. We estimate a long time persistence exponent for the underlying
Japanese financial market to be 0.5.
