Japanese investors bullish on NY again: As the Asian nation's economy rebounds from its "lost decade" period, its companies have returned to snapping up real estate across the city.

You're not having a 1980s flashback: Japan does indeed appear to be on a buying spree in New York once again.

Four decades ago Japan owned some of the skyline: Mitsubishi Estate Co., for example, once controlled Rockefeller Center. But the boom didn't end well for many investors, who got wiped out by the early 1990s real estate market collapse.

As the Asian nation's economy rebounds from its "lost decade" period, investors are snapping up real estate across the city, from Midtown spires to SoHo storefronts to Alphabet City walk-ups.

The deals happening now are just as high-profile as the Reagan-era Rock Center play. In late June Mori Trust, a developer that rose to prominence accumulating cheap land in post-World War II Tokyo, grabbed a major stake in 245 Park Ave., a commercial tower near Grand Central co-owned by SL Green Realty Corp. and a top address of financial firms.

Landlords from the Land of the Rising Sun have made some key adjustments from the last go-round, however, including taking on more partners and less debt, which has some developers, brokers and professors saying the current wave is durable.

"There's no question there's a new sense of optimism," said Andy Nathan, a co-founder of MCRE Partners, a four-year-old Midtown-based landlord that relies on Japanese investors for about a third of its capital. "They feel comfortable in New York again."

If historic Midtown trophy towers were the favorite asset class in the 1980s, the Japanese money today seems spread more widely, including with property types that were a harder sell before: small prewar rental buildings.

"The Japanese often like the brand-new," said William Crable, who runs the New York office of Tokyo-based investment group Efficiency Capital Advisors, a firm he founded in 1993 that initially focused on marketing debt that had soured when Japan's real estate bubble burst. "While you and I might think a graffiti-covered older building is cool, they have sometimes been a hard sell. But then when you explain what kinds of rents the older buildings get, they eventually come around."

In 1997 Crable moved to Tokyo to work on behalf of Lehman Bros. and ended up staying for 16 years.

In recent years, with Crable's return to Manhattan, the focus of his...