Spikes in commodity prices helped lift wholesale prices by 2.0 percent in November from a year earlier, up for the ninth month in a row, the Bank of Japan said Friday.
The prices, gauged by the BOJ's corporate goods price index, registered 96.7 against the base of 100 for 2000, the BOJ said in a preliminary report.
The jump was the largest since October's revised gain of 2.0 percent, which was the largest since the 2.0 percent jump in December 1990.
The index registered 0.2 percent growth in March for the first gain since July 2000, and has continued rising since, fueling optimism that deflation may be coming to an end, according to the report.
The rise in November resulted from a 20.3 percent surge in prices of petroleum and coal products, including gasoline and diesel oil, which followed recent rises in crude oil prices.
Steel products gained 18.8 percent as demand outstripped supply, and nonferrous metal products rose 14.1 percent, pushing the index higher. Chemical products climbed 6.6 percent.
But machinery products dropped across the board. Electrical machinery prices fell 4.3 percent, led by falling prices for personal computers and mobile phones as manufacturers continued cutting costs and raising competition. Prices of precision machinery fell 1.3 percent.