After three decades of near-zero interest rates born from the wreckage of a burst asset bubble, Japan's central bank has raised its benchmark rate to 1.25 percent — the highest since the mid-1990s. The Bank of Japan's move reflects a quiet but consequential conviction: that the economy is finally strong enough to bear the weight of normalcy. It is a threshold moment not merely for borrowers and savers, but for a nation whose entire economic psychology was shaped by a generation of monetary stillness.