The story
Prewar
The Tokyo Stock Exchange was established on May 15, 1878, as the Tokyo Kabushiki Torihikijo (東京株式取引所; also literally means the Tokyo Stock Exchange and shortened as Tōkabu (東株)) under the direction of then-Finance Minister Ōkuma Shigenobu and capitalist advocate Shibusawa Eiichi. Trading began on June 1, 1878.
In 1943, the exchange was combined with eleven other stock exchanges in major Japanese cities to form a single Japanese Stock Exchange (日本証券取引所, Nippon Shōken Torihikisho). The combined exchange was shut down on August 1, days before the bombing of Hiroshima.
Postwar
The Tokyo Stock Exchange reopened under its current Japanese name on May 16, 1949, pursuant to the new Securities Exchange Act.
The TSE runup from 1983 to 1990 was unprecedented, in 1990 it accounted for over 60% of the world's stock market capitalization (by far the world's largest) before falling precipitously in value and rank one of the 4th largest exchange in the world by market capitalization of listed shares.
The current TSE building was opened on May 23, 1988, replacing the original TSE building from 1931, and the trading floor of the TSE was closed on April 30, 1999, so that the exchange could switch to electronic trading for all transactions. A new facility, called TSE Arrows (東証アローズ, Tōshō Arrows), opened on May 9, 2000. In 2010, the TSE launched its Arrowhead trading facility.
In 2001, the TSE restructured itself as a kabushiki gaisha ("stock company"): before this time, it was structured as an incorporated association (社団法人, shadan hōjin) with its members as shareholders.
On 15 June 2007, the TSE paid $303 million to acquire a 4.99% stake in Singapore Exchange Ltd.
The London Stock Exchange (LSE) and the TSE are developing jointly traded products and share technology, marking the latest cross-border deal among bourses as international competition heats up.
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In July 2008, the LSE and the TSE announced a new joint venture Tokyo-based market, which will be based on the LSE's Alternative Investment Market (AIM).
Technology problems
The exchange was only able to operate for 90 minutes on November 1, 2005, due to bugs with a newly installed transactions system, developed by Fujitsu, which was supposed to help cope with higher trading volumes. The interruption in trading was the worst in the history of the exchange until October 1, 2020. Trading was suspended for four-and-a-half hours.
During the initial public offering of advertising giant Dentsu, in December 2001, a trader at UBS Warburg, the Swiss investment bank, sold 610,000 shares in this company at ¥6 each, while he intended to sell 16 shares at ¥600,000. The bank lost £71 million.
During yet another initial public offering, that of J-Com, on December 8, 2005, an employee at Mizuho Securities Co., Ltd. mistakenly typed an order to sell 600,000 shares at ¥1 each, instead of an order to sell 1 share at ¥600,000. Mizuho failed to catch the error; the Tokyo Stock Exchange initially blocked attempts to cancel the order, resulting in a net loss of US$347 million to be shared between the exchange and Mizuho. Both companies are now trying to deal with their troubles: lack of error checking, lack of safeguards, lack of reliability, lack of transparency, lack of testing, loss of confidence, and loss of profits. On 11 December, the TSE acknowledged that its system was at fault in the Mizuho trade. On 21 December, Takuo Tsurushima, chief executive of the TSE, and two other senior executives resigned over the Mizuho affair.
On January 17, 2006, the Nikkei 225 fell 2.8%, its fastest drop in nine months, as investors sold stocks across the board in the wake of a raid by prosecutors on internet company livedoor. The Tokyo Stock Exchange suspended trading 20 minutes before the close on January 18 due to the trade volume threatening to exceed the exchange's computer system's capacity of 4.5 million trades per day. This was called the "livedoor shock". The exchange quickly increased its order capacity to five million trades a day.
On October 9, 2018, one of the four gateways used for order entry was taken down after Merrill Lynch Japan Securities erroneously tried to establish a second connection after it had already connected. Even though brokerages have access to alternative gateways, the outage caused "delays in execution, correction and cancellation" for many securities firms including Daiwa Securities and Nomura.
On October 1, 2020, for the first time in its history as an all electronic exchange, the Tokyo Stock Exchange had to suspend trading in all shares for a whole day due to a technical glitch, causing buying and selling to freeze. This was announced just minutes before 9 a.m., when it was scheduled to open. The problem was found to be in "the system for relaying market information", hence making the glitch a network problem, but the Asahi Shimbun reported that the glitch was due to a mechanical failure. The issue stemmed back to the "Arrowhead" trading system and the inability to fail over to backup hardware. Other stock markets in Japan, including regional exchanges in Nagoya, Fukuoka and Sapporo, also suspended trading because they used the same technology platform as the TSE. Meanwhile, derivatives on the OSE continued trading, with Nikkei futures ending the day 0.56% higher. Japan Exchange Group Inc., which operates the Tokyo Stock Exchange, said that the suspension would be indefinite until the problem was resolved. Normal trading was resumed the following day.
From Wikipedia’s article on Tokyo Stock Exchange, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.5