Japan Wages Slump to OECD 24th: Geopolitics and Debt
Kanako Mita, Sawako Utsumi, and Lee Jay Walker
Modern Tokyo Times
Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi inherits the same unresolved malaise that has haunted a succession of Japanese leaders: how to arrest Japan’s long, grinding decline—and whether she possesses either the will or the courage to confront a debt crisis permanently relegated to the political back burner.
The omens are bleak. Japan, mirroring the failures of other economically strained powers, appears destined to prioritize military expansion over social and economic renewal. At the same time, the nation is strangled by a relentlessly rising cost of living, collapsing real wages, and a birth rate in freefall—a demographic time bomb ticking ever louder beneath the surface of political platitudes.
The numbers tell a brutal story. Japan now ranks 24th out of 38 OECD nations in per-capita GDP, trailing not only its Western peers but also regional rivals South Korea and Taiwan. This is not merely a currency story. While the weak yen exacerbates pain, Japan’s stagnation is far deeper—rooted in decades of anaemic growth, sustained only by endless fiscal interventions and debt-fuelled illusions.
Wealthy foreign investors snap up prime real estate in Tokyo and other major cities, while ordinary Japanese citizens are pushed further toward the margins. The beneficiaries of this distorted system are clear: financial elites and speculators riding a heavily manipulated Nikkei, while households struggle with shrinking purchasing power and a daily erosion of dignity.
Japan’s GDP fell 4.1% year-on-year, pushing the country down yet another rung in the OECD rankings. As AP News reported: “Japan’s economy contracted at an annual pace of 2.3% in the July–September period… as exports suffered from the impact of U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariffs and public investments slipped.”
Yet for Takaichi—as for those who came before her—it is politically easier to pledge ever-closer military alignment with Washington, to echo strategies aimed at containing China and weakening the Russian Federation, while backing Ukraine in lockstep with the European Union. Such posturing comes cheap rhetorically—but not economically.
Japan’s debt-to-GDP ratio hovers near an extraordinary 240%. The population is aging rapidly, the workforce is shrinking, and living costs are punishing. This is hardly the foundation for underwriting America’s regional ambitions—especially when doing so risks deepening tensions with neighboring powers such as China and Russia, upon whom Japan remains economically intertwined.
The irony is inescapable. The United States itself is drowning in roughly $38 trillion of public debt, with a debt-to-GDP ratio around 124%. When the next global downturn arrives—as it inevitably will—both nations may discover that strategic bravado offers little protection against economic reality.
Across the G7—from France to Japan, from the United States to the United Kingdom—citizens are enduring a self-inflicted cost-of-living crisis, while governments pursue endless geopolitical schemes that generate debt, division, and instability. Taxpayers are treated not as citizens to be protected, but as resources to be milked, funding policies that repeatedly fail—while the wealthy harvest windfall gains from soaring stock markets.
Societies are fraying. Trust is collapsing. Millions feel betrayed by political elites who preach sacrifice while insulating themselves from its consequences.
Japan’s real wages continue to fall, and its humiliating OECD ranking stands as a stark indictment of decades of misrule. Yet instead of confronting structural decay—productivity, wages, demographics, debt—the political class remains fixated on war, containment, and posturing it cannot afford.
The same pattern repeats across the G7. France, Germany, Japan, the UK—all channel vast resources into military buildup, while ordinary citizens are crushed by rent, energy bills, and food costs. Either political leaders have lost touch with reality, or they have simply stopped caring.
In Japan’s case, the burden is already immense: rising import costs, a weakened yen, colossal public debt, and a rapidly aging society. Pouring yet more resources into military priorities will only deepen the strain on a population already stretched to breaking point.
Consider the human reality beneath the abstractions. In Tokyo—Asia’s global metropolis—the minimum wage stands at ¥1,163 an hour, barely £5.80 at recent exchange rates. In Fukushima, it falls to a shocking ¥955, roughly £4.78. This is not resilience. It is quiet desperation.
This is the true legacy of the Liberal Democratic Party’s decades-long stewardship: from postwar promise to prolonged stagnation; from hope to exhaustion; from shared prosperity to enduring insecurity for millions of ordinary Japanese people.
And unless the political class changes course, the decline will not merely continue—it will harden into permanence.
Modern Tokyo News is part of the Modern Tokyo Times group
http://moderntokyotimes.com Modern Tokyo Times – International News and Japan News
http://sawakoart.com – Sawako Utsumi and her website – Modern Tokyo Times artist
https://moderntokyonews.com Modern Tokyo News – Tokyo News and International News
PLEASE JOIN ON TWITTER
https://twitter.com/MTT_News Modern Tokyo Times
PLEASE JOIN ON FACEBOOK
http://facebook.com/moderntokyotimes
AloJapan.com