A report claiming that “wages aren’t rising, yet taxes and social insurance premiums keep getting heavier” sparked a wide-ranging debate on 5ch’s News Express+ board. According to an OECD survey, as of 2022 Japan ranked 25th out of 38 member countries in wages, with an average in the high 4-million-yen range — a huge gap compared to top countries earning over 10 million yen. In the thread, users criticized the politicians responsible for tax hikes and ballooning social security costs, vented frustration over “hidden burdens” like consumption tax and national health insurance premiums, and debated the merits of the welfare (livelihood protection) system, with some expressing regret over how companies and policy abandoned the “Employment Ice Age” generation. Others pushed back, arguing that “wages actually are rising,” splitting opinion over the gap between statistics and lived experience.
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According to a survey by the OECD (Organisation for International Cooperation and Development), Japan ranked 25th in wages among the 38 member countries in 2022. While top-ranked countries like Switzerland, Iceland, and Luxembourg sit at the 10-million-yen level, Japan is in the high 4-million-yen range — far below the member average.
For reference, according to the National Tax Agency’s “Reiwa 6 (2024) Survey on Private Sector Salaries,” average annual income by age group breaks down as follows.
Source: news.yahoo.co.jp / Original article here
2AnonymousSep 13, 2026 10:22
Who turned Japan into this!?
43AnonymousSep 13, 2026 10:36
Re: #2
The voters who elected these garbage politicians.
94AnonymousSep 13, 2026 10:58
Re: #2
It's the consumption tax.
Japan's decline started right when this thing began — just look at the GDP growth graph, it shows it plainly.
272AnonymousSep 13, 2026 11:48
Re: #2
The politicians from the '90s through the 2000s.
5AnonymousSep 13, 2026 10:23
Tax revenue keeps hitting record highs every single year, but the LDP crowd trots out "where's the funding gonna come from" the moment it's inconvenient.
95AnonymousSep 13, 2026 10:59
Re: #5
Where does it all disappear to every year, I wonder.
195AnonymousSep 13, 2026 11:25
Re: #5
When prices rise, government spending goes up too, you know.
7AnonymousSep 13, 2026 10:24
Re: #1
Moving to Tokyo in the first place is just stupid. If you're getting into a famous university, your parents are rich enough to send you an allowance, and you have a clear plan to land a big-income job in a major industry down the road, fine — but otherwise it's the height of foolishness.
193AnonymousSep 13, 2026 11:24
Re: #7
Saving money while living with your parents is the right call these days.
Building a house
and paying double living costs —
were we all just brainwashed by the government into thinking that was the "correct" path???
For reference, my
unmarried son still lives at home
and has saved 20 million yen in his 30s.
A relative's kid has the grandparents watch the children while both parents work,
and they've saved over 100 million yen.
And it's not even the countryside —
it's a government-designated city,
3 minutes from the station.
9AnonymousSep 13, 2026 10:25
Pensions and welfare are on the side that's squeezing money out of workers.
Some beggar is bound to show up on this thread screaming to scrap the consumption tax, but know your place.
32AnonymousSep 13, 2026 10:32
Re: #9
Exactly this.
The reality is working adults get hit with massive tax burdens
while lazy welfare recipients live a carefree life.
They should just abolish the whole welfare system.
115AnonymousSep 13, 2026 11:03
Re: #32
They should renovate closed-down schools in rapidly aging rural areas into dormitories with three meals a day for welfare recipients,
pay recipients just about 10,000 yen a month in pocket money,
and shuttle them to hospital visits by minibus.
If it's dorm life, there's no need to give everyone their own smartphone either.
Honestly, it's absurd to let people who can't support themselves live in independent households in the first place.
13AnonymousSep 13, 2026 10:26
The era of retiring at 70 is right around the corner.
104AnonymousSep 13, 2026 11:01
Re: #13
What are you talking about — retirement age is going to be 95.
19AnonymousSep 13, 2026 10:27
The hidden tax that is health insurance premiums is even worse. If you're self-employed, it runs over 1 million yen a year.
84AnonymousSep 13, 2026 10:57
Re: #19
Dunno what job you're in, but it's your own fault for not signing up for something like the Construction Workers' National Health Insurance.
It's around 45,000 yen a month regardless of income.
24AnonymousSep 13, 2026 10:29
The child allowance used to be 30,000 yen every two months, but
it got cut to 20,000 yen starting the month my kid turned 3.
Our income went up, so the daycare fee also
rose from 15,000 yen to 30,000 yen.
Isn't it contradictory to tell people to have kids and raise them while doing this?
224AnonymousSep 13, 2026 11:30
Re: #24
At the start of the Heisei era,
having a second child got you
just 2,500 yen
a month!
And even that 2,500 yen only lasted until about age 3!
If they'd
beefed up the allowance back then,
more people would have had kids…
I wanted about 4 kids,
but I gave up once I thought about tuition costs.
56AnonymousSep 13, 2026 10:42
It's your own fault if you don't put in the effort.
Just go earn money doing anything, even shady gig work ("yami baito" — under-the-table jobs often tied to scams or crime).
Personal responsibility.
59AnonymousSep 13, 2026 10:45
Re: #56
Doubt it.
Japanese people are genuinely hardworking.
The only explanation for low wages despite that is the government steering toward a weak yen and negligence on the part of companies.
>Real labor productivity growth, adjusted for inflation, was +0.2% year-on-year, marking the fourth straight year of gains.
>On a quarterly basis, it has been positive for six consecutive quarters from Jan-Mar 2024 through Apr-Jun 2025, the longest streak of productivity growth since 2000.
>Nominal labor productivity per worker also topped 9 million yen for the first time, reaching 9.07 million yen.
https://ailesplus.com/news/?p=61019
93AnonymousSep 13, 2026 10:58
Re: #56
Shady gig work is a no-go.
61AnonymousSep 13, 2026 10:47
If they'd helped the Employment Ice Age generation 25 years ago, things wouldn't have turned out like this.
It's entirely on companies.
87AnonymousSep 13, 2026 10:57
Re: #61
Whatever the root cause, I think things would've turned out quite differently if they'd corrected course back then.
Decades of being forced to endure it — and, annoyingly, the Japanese trait of being able to just endure it made things worse too.
63AnonymousSep 13, 2026 10:47
Re: #41
Disabled people have disability pensions, and the elderly have old-age pensions,
so it'd be fine to abolish it entirely.
116AnonymousSep 13, 2026 11:03
Re: #63
Do you even know how much that is per month?
75AnonymousSep 13, 2026 10:54
Japan became a temp-staffing superpower — the Koizumi-Takenaka duo broke everything.
91AnonymousSep 13, 2026 10:58
Re: #75
Well, it was the voters at the time who gave that overwhelming support, though.
They looked down on regular employees and civil servants as "slaves" compared to temp work,
praising it to the skies as the free lifestyle and way of working of the future — even on this very board.
86AnonymousSep 13, 2026 10:57
Wages are rising, aren't they. Bonuses too…
Minimum wage has gone up quite a bit too.
Why do they shamelessly write false articles like this?
239AnonymousSep 13, 2026 11:35
Re: #86
Because the vast majority of middle-aged and older workers haven't seen much of a raise.
245AnonymousSep 13, 2026 11:38
Re: #86
Go bring me the median wage graph.
97AnonymousSep 13, 2026 11:00
Losing out even to South Korea and Taiwan, whose populations are less than half of Japan's —
how low is this country's productivity?
This is the price for not investing in anything since the bubble burst.
111AnonymousSep 13, 2026 11:02
Re: #97
Maybe it's that a lot of people aren't working?
The people who are working have high productivity,
but the non-working, non-productive ones drag the average down or something?
102AnonymousSep 13, 2026 11:01
Re: #95 It's because the debt is way too massive. In a sense, it's like paying off a revolving credit balance.
107AnonymousSep 13, 2026 11:01
Re: #102
Debt owed to whom?
131AnonymousSep 13, 2026 11:07
The tax that's taken comes back to you anyway, so it's all the same lol
137AnonymousSep 13, 2026 11:09
Re: #131 They're handing it out to people who never had it taken from them too, so some people come out even and some don't.
188AnonymousSep 13, 2026 11:24
Re: #131
There are all kinds of handout payments, after all.
Demanding handouts is what drives taxes up.
Chicken or the egg, huh lol
Background and Key Points of This Debate
The National Tax Agency’s “Survey on Private Sector Salaries” and OECD wage comparisons make headlines every year, but it’s worth noting the difference between "average" and "median." Averages are easily pulled upward by high earners, so they tend to diverge from what people actually feel. As some commenters noted, nominal labor productivity itself is on an upward trend — the real issue lies in a distribution structure where productivity gains aren’t reflected in wages. Rising taxes and social insurance premiums also have structural roots in the natural growth of social security costs driven by the falling birthrate and aging population, so the situation can’t be explained by simply blaming the government. The trajectory of economic growth since the consumption tax was introduced, the expansion of temp staffing work, and delayed support for the Employment Ice Age generation are all policy decisions that have piled up over the years to produce the current situation — a nuance that’s easy to miss in the back-and-forth of comments alone.
*This article is compiled and summarized from the 5ch (News Express+) thread “‘My pay hasn’t changed, but my tax burden just keeps growing…’ — the ‘cruel mechanism’ behind Japan’s ongoing impoverishment.”
