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The story
There was a time when Japan’s GDP grew to a scale that nearly rivaled America’s, but it has since lost momentum. The IMF’s 2026 forecast puts Japan at 4th place worldwide, and by 2027 it’s projected to be overtaken by both India and the UK, dropping to 6th. On 5ch’s “Nandemo Jikkyo G” (Live News General) board, posters pointed to causes like Japanese-style management that avoided price hikes by suppressing labor costs, falling working hours, and the effect of the weak yen when converted to dollars — with the thread split over which factor was really the root cause.
What people said
The period the thread title's talking about is the postwar era, you know.
We actually climbed all the way to 2nd place after losing, though.
But the UK, which just overtook us this time, seems to work even less than we do. So really, it's about efficiency being bad.
Seriously though, the working population is shrinking, so of course hours are going down too.
Even under Abe they wimped out and stuck with austerity — raised the consumption tax twice, no less.
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That increases the cost called "labor costs,"
so that gets passed on through price hikes too
That IS economic growth — that's literally what rising wages looks like. But Japan alone chose the "cheaper is always better~" kind of society.
Wages aren't rising at all, it's only prices going up.
That's because "we're taking a loss but still working hard not to raise prices, for our customers' sake" was the kind of thing that used to get praised.
The public bought into "cheaper is always better" too, and we all ended up strangling each other, keeping up a society for over 30 years where working people's wages never rise.
Overseas, prices are rising faster than wages anyway, so it's hopeless either way — apparently there are even countries where making customers cover the gap via tips still has people groaning lol
Super anxious about retirement, yeah.
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2. Passing rising worker wages (labor costs) on to prices
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Japanese companies went all in on holding down #2's cost, working to keep prices low and price hikes to a minimum.
So prices stayed cheap and stable for a long time — but was that actually good?
It wasn't, that's exactly why we got the Lost 30 Years.
Ordinary people's lives were still better back then than they are now, though.
It's the exact same labor — making and serving lunch — so there's no way pay for the people doing that work ends up at the same level between a country that pays $35 and Japan, which pays only $6. There's no way economic growth ends up the same either.
That's because we had 30 years of deflation. But even converted to dollars, Japan is still asset-rich. France, meanwhile, has no assets and keeps borrowing anyway, which is why it's at risk of default.
It's such a classic declining-nation move that everyone can only defend Japan by trashing other countries like this.
And the funny part is, the guy who wrote #68 himself has zero assets. Hilarious, right?
When workers' wages go up, the cost called labor costs increases, so prices go up too. Yet people refuse to tolerate rising prices while asking "why don't wages rise" or "why hasn't the economy grown" — honestly, you have to wonder what they're even saying.
Then why aren't wages in Japan rising right now?
As long as you can get by, isn't that fine? Is your life actually that hard?
So… what's the actual answer to my question? lol
Because of employment regulations — companies can't fire incompetent workers, so they're forced to sacrifice everything else just to keep paying those people's salaries.
So then wages won't rise even when prices do.
• 1st: United States (approx. $32.38 trillion)
• 2nd: China (approx. $20.85 trillion)
• 3rd: Germany (approx. $5.45 trillion)
• 4th: Japan (approx. $4.34 trillion)
• 5th: United Kingdom (approx. $4.26 trillion)
• 6th: India (approx. $4.06 trillion)
According to the latest forecast, due to low growth and the weak yen, Japan is projected to be overtaken by India and the UK in 2027, dropping to 6th place worldwide.
Forecasts aren't reliable anyway — there's still a chance a global recession pushes the yen stronger from here and Japan's GDP climbs back up.
Whether it's the big trading houses, Toyota, the megabanks, or SoftBank, they're all pouring money into overseas investment.
The reason they won't invest in Japan is probably that population decline is shrinking both demand and the workforce, on top of earthquake risk.
So far, the forecasts from a few years back have turned out wrong, and Japan's ranking drop has actually come sooner than expected.
If they were wrong before, the opposite could happen too.
That's weird, isn't it — they call a weak currency a "beggar-thy-neighbor" policy, yet our economic neighbors in East Asia and the US are growing like crazy while our country alone is losing.
Background and Key Points of This Topic
Under the IMF’s 2026 forecast, Japan’s nominal GDP ranks just behind Germany and the UK, with a projected fall to 6th place worldwide by 2027 as it’s overtaken by both India and the UK. That said, dollar-denominated GDP is heavily affected by exchange rates — a detail that’s easy to miss — meaning the ranking can shift even with an unchanged real economy depending on whether the rate is around ¥80 to the dollar, as it once was, or around ¥160, as it is now. In the thread, one camp argued that Japanese companies’ management style of avoiding price hikes by holding down labor costs caused wage stagnation, while another camp emphasized the structural factor of a shrinking workforce. Many posts, however, blurred the line between the technical factor of the weak yen and genuine stagnation in the real economy, showing just how hard it is to pin Japan’s “decline” on a single cause.
※This article is an excerpt and summary based on the 5ch (Nandemo Jikkyo G) thread “Japan: “There Was a Time We Almost Matched America in GDP” — Why Did It Suddenly Become Washed Up?“
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