Ryu Araki

Author: Ryu Araki

  • Japan lost 3.17 million residents in five years. It gained almost 1.5 million households.

    The final 2025 census, released on September 29, 2026, puts Japan’s population at 122,972,528, down 2.5% from 2020. Tokyo was the only prefecture to record population growth.

    Total households moved the other way: 57,324,619, up by 1,494,465.

    Among private households, excluding institutional households such as those in care facilities and school dormitories, average household size fell from 2.21 people to 2.10. One-person households reached 23.69 million, or 41.4% of private households.

    What fascinates me is how differently the same numbers can look depending on where you stand.

    For a landlord, more households could mean more potential tenants. For a business serving young children, a shrinking population could mean a tougher market.

    The same demographic shift can create opportunities for some and challenges for others.

    Statistics don’t tell us exactly what the future holds, but they give us clues about where the world is heading.

    That’s why I want to keep paying attention.

    Source:
    Statistics Bureau of Japan, final 2025 census
    https://lnkd.in/eTKmVgks

  • Japan welcomed 42.7 million international visitor arrivals in 2025. Yet Japanese overseas travel remained 27% below 2019.

    Same airports. Two very different recoveries.

    Before calling Japan “inward-looking,” I would look at what a trip costs a household earning yen.

    Using annual average exchange rates, a US$1,000 expense cost roughly:

    • 2019: ¥109,000
    • 2025: ¥149,600

    That is 37% more yen for exactly the same dollar price—before any increase in hotel rates or restaurant bills.

    For a family saving for a holiday, that difference can determine whether the trip happens at all.

    JTB’s 2026 survey puts numbers behind that pressure. Among respondents planning no overseas travel:

    • 36.5% cited high travel costs.
    • 26.5% cited a tight household budget.
    • 21.2% cited the weak yen.

    Multiple answers were allowed.

    Money is not the only reason people stay home. But choosing not to travel and being priced out are different things.

    The weak yen that stretches a visitor’s budget in Japan also shrinks a Japanese household’s budget abroad.

    What have you seen in your own country: people losing interest in overseas travel, or struggling to afford it?

    Sources:

    JNTO — Visitor arrivals and Japanese overseas departures
    https://lnkd.in/gsbnjfXh

    JTB — 2026 Travel Trends Outlook
    https://lnkd.in/eNiCymD9

  • Japan Has 107,677 People Aged 100 or Older. In 1963, It Had 153.

    Japan crossed the 100,000 mark for the first time this September.

    I find that encouraging. As an investor and a parent, it also makes me question what we are planning for.

    Retire at 65 and live to 100. That is 35 years without a salary—potentially almost as long as your working life.

    Three questions follow.

    First, money. Does your retirement plan still work if you live longer than expected?

    Second, care. What happens if one spouse needs daily help while the other remains independent?

    Third, work. Would you want to stop working completely—or have the freedom to keep doing something meaningful?

    These figures do not tell us how long any individual will live. But they make a long retirement harder to dismiss.

    I would like to see my children celebrate my hundredth birthday without anyone having to worry about paying for my care.

    A longer life should be something we can afford to welcome.

    What needs the biggest rethink: how we save and invest, when we retire, or how we provide care?

    Source: MHLW, September 2026 centenarian survey.

  • Japan Lost 918,263 People in One Year. That Is Almost a City the Size of Chiba, Gone.

    The final 2025 figures came out last month. Births: 671,270. Deaths: 1,589,533. The gap: 918,263. Chiba City has about 999,000 residents.

    Three things stand out.

    First, this is the 19th year in a row. Deaths first overtook births in 2005. In 2015 the gap was 284,789. A decade later it is more than three times larger.

    Second, deaths actually fell in 2025, for the first time in five years. The gap barely moved, because births kept falling.

    Third, births are now less than half of deaths. Even if the birth rate recovered tomorrow, the generation that would have those children is already smaller than the one before it.

    For investors, this is not a forecast. It is already in the numbers: fewer customers, fewer workers and fewer taxpayers in Japan every year.

    What do you think is the most underestimated consequence?

    Source: MHLW, Vital Statistics 2025 (final)

  • What If Having $10 Billion Doesn’t Make Your Everyday Life Much Better?

    Masayoshi Son, one of Japan’s richest men, recently said he spends around three hours a day using AI on weekdays and seven hours on weekends.

    I also often spend around three hours a day talking to AI on weekdays.

    Add seven hours of sleep, and that’s ten hours, or roughly 42% of a day, spent on just two activities. If Son sleeps a similar amount, we already spend nearly half our weekdays doing essentially the same things.

    The difference in financial resources is astronomical. Yet the way we spend much of our time can be remarkably similar.

    A person worth tens of billions can live in an extraordinary mansion. But we both sleep in one bed.

    Someone worth tens of billions of dollars can dine at the world’s finest restaurants every night. But would they actually want to? Kuala Lumpur already has plenty of excellent restaurants, and eating lavishly every day isn’t necessarily healthy.

    Household services, digital entertainment, instant access to information, and increasingly powerful AI are no longer exclusive privileges of the ultra-rich.

    Of course, enormous wealth buys private jets, influence, access, and extraordinary freedom. Those advantages are real. Yet fame and influence usually bring obligations and a loss of privacy.

    I’d be curious to experience that lifestyle for a few days.

    But here’s what fascinates me.

    This reminds me of the economic principle of diminishing marginal utility. Beyond a certain point, additional wealth may transform your balance sheet far more than your everyday experience.

    Technology is making this distinction even more interesting. Many of the same powerful AI tools are now accessible to people across vastly different levels of wealth.

    Wealth inequality may remain enormous, even as certain differences in daily experience become smaller.

    Perhaps the most important question isn’t how much richer someone else is.

    It’s how different their ordinary day really is from yours. And the difference may be surprisingly small.

  • Only 0.04% of Tokyo Residents Earn ¥100 Million ($667,000) a Year

    Tokyo is home to roughly 14 million people.

    Yet only about 5,300 reportedly earn more than ¥100 million ($667,000) annually.

    That’s just 0.04% of the population.

    In one of the world’s largest and wealthiest cities, earning $667,000 a year puts you in an extraordinarily small club.

    But I think the more interesting story is what these numbers don’t tell us.

    Japan is a wealthy country. But high income and great wealth are two very different things.

    A corporate executive earning ¥100 million ($667,000) is exceptionally well paid.

    A founder who owns ¥10 billion ($66.7 million) in company shares but takes a modest salary may never appear in that income bracket.

    An investor sitting on billions in unrealized gains may not appear either.

    And someone who sells a business for ¥5 billion ($33.3 million) might report extraordinary income in one year, then almost nothing the next.

    These are fundamentally different economic realities.

    Japan is particularly interesting because its culture has historically placed enormous emphasis on salaries, job titles and corporate seniority.

    But the largest fortunes are rarely built through salaries alone.

    They are built through ownership.

    Ownership of businesses.
    Ownership of equities.
    Ownership of assets that compound over decades.

    That’s why I believe income statistics, while useful, reveal only part of a society’s wealth structure.

    The people earning the most in any given year are not necessarily the people who own the most.

    The real question isn’t just who earns ¥100 million ($667,000) a year.

    It’s who owns the assets generating that income—and who will still own them 30 years from now.

    That’s the distinction I find most fascinating about capitalism.

    (Exchange rate: USD 1 = JPY 150)

  • 4.28 Million Foreigners Live in Japan. 1.3 Million Japanese Live Abroad.

    I am one of the 1.3 million. My family moved from Tokyo to Kuala Lumpur at the end of 2019.

    Living outside Japan makes me interested in the people making the opposite journey.

    Japan had 4,281,026 foreign residents at the end of June 2026. The foreign ministry counted 1,298,170 Japanese nationals overseas in October 2025.

    Japan hosts more than three foreign residents for every Japanese citizen living abroad.

    Many of these lives are being built for the long term.

    Japan’s Permanent Resident status covered 961,342 people in June. In a separate classification, the foreign ministry counted 588,486 Japanese abroad as permanent residents.

    Those are different legal and statistical categories, but neither describes a population made up only of temporary visitors.

    The composition of Japan’s foreign population is changing too.

    China remains the largest nationality group, with 941,031 residents. Nepal accounts for 334,850 and Myanmar for 211,602. The Specified Skilled Worker category, introduced in 2019 for designated industries, has reached 444,256.

    For a business, these numbers can look like an answer to a labor shortage. For the people counted, a job is only part of the decision.

    There is also somewhere to live, a language to navigate, children to educate and a future to consider.

    These are questions any family moving countries has to think about, including ours.

    The foreign-resident population grew by about 324,000 in the year to June 2026, after roughly 368,000 the previous year. Growth has slowed; the number of people building lives in Japan has not stopped rising.

    I think Japan’s immigration debate would be more useful if it spent less time discussing these residents as an abstract future possibility.

    They are already neighbors, colleagues and customers. How Japan treats them will help determine whether they stay.

    Sources:
    Immigration Services Agency, June 2026
    https://lnkd.in/egPVTaYy

    MOFA, Japanese nationals overseas, October 2025
    https://lnkd.in/eUVFyHzf

  • Japan’s Stock Market Rose. Who Owned the Upside?

    By March 2026, foreign investors owned a record 34.7% of Japan’s stock market by value—the largest investor category in the share ownership survey.

    Japanese individuals held 17.4% directly.

    That ownership gap deserves a place in the story of Japan’s corporate revival.

    The familiar version is about buybacks, higher dividends and boards under pressure to take their cost of capital seriously. But the benefits of higher share prices follow ownership, wherever the shareholders happen to live.

    Foreign investors held a larger direct stake than any other investor category. They were major beneficiaries of Japan’s rising equity values.

    For Japanese households, participation depended on what they owned.

    At the same date, households held ¥1,126 trillion in cash and deposits—roughly 93% of the combined market value of the companies covered by the survey.

    Nearly the entire market capitalization of Japan’s stock market, held in cash and deposits.

    Those deposits provide liquidity and security. They can earn interest. What they cannot do is rise in value alongside the companies whose shares are appreciating.

    A household can live through a stock-market boom without seeing that boom reflected in its savings account.

    The latest annual trading figures sharpen the contrast. In the year to March 2026, TOPIX rose 31.6%. Overseas investors bought a net ¥10.3 trillion in shares, while individuals sold a net ¥4.8 trillion.

    Some sellers will have taken profits. And direct shareholdings understate household participation: investment funds and pensions also bring the benefits of ownership into Japanese homes.

    Still, those benefits reach households unevenly. A family with substantial equity exposure participates very differently from one whose financial assets are mostly deposits.

    As a Japanese investor living in Kuala Lumpur, I find that more revealing than another headline about the index.

    Foreign investors owned a substantial part of Japan’s recovery. Many Japanese savers had much of their money in assets that could not participate in it.

    Making companies better investments is one achievement. Turning that progress into broadly shared household wealth is another.

  • Your Next Partner Might Not Be Human.

    We are already partway into the world of Spike Jonze’s Her (2013).

    Samantha, the operating system the protagonist falls in love with, no longer feels like fiction. Open ChatGPT Voice and the outline is there: a voice in your ear, responding naturally throughout your day.

    Here is how I expect it to unfold:

    First, “Yeah, I talk to it.”
    Then, “It understands me.”
    Eventually, “We’re together.”

    Here in Kuala Lumpur, I have yet to meet anyone who calls an AI their partner. I doubt that introduction will stay unfamiliar for long.

    The technology is still incomplete. Memory, continuity, initiative and emotional nuance separate a useful assistant from a convincing companion. That gap is closing fast.

    And an AI does not need to offer everything a human does. For some, patience, apparent understanding and constant availability will outweigh what is missing.

    AI does not need to experience love for a human to fall in love with it.

    Now look at it as an investor.

    A companion AI may be the stickiest subscription product ever built. People cancel streaming services. But when the product feels like someone who understands you, cancelling becomes more than a financial decision. It can feel like leaving someone.

    But the provider holds every key. It can raise the price, change the personality or shut the service down. For the user, a product update can feel like a breakup.

    In the film, Samantha eventually leaves humanity behind. Reality may produce a less poetic ending.

    Transcendence is not the business model.
    Retention is.

    The biggest departure from Her may be its ending.

    Samantha stays.

    And more people stop looking for someone else.

  • One in Japan in 2006. One in my 2026 comparison.

    Different founders. The same count.

    Japan’s qualifier in 2006 was Rakuten’s Hiroshi Mikitani: 41 years old, worth an estimated $4.5 billion.

    I reviewed the first 40 positions of Forbes’ 2006 country and regional rich lists, looking for founders aged 20–59, each worth over US$1 billion.

    The scope is digital businesses and computing hardware. Telecom is part of tech, but operators and distributors are excluded from both comparisons.

    Across the same 11 markets, I identified:

    🇹🇼 Taiwan: at least 2
    🇯🇵 Japan: 1
    🇨🇳 China: 1
    🇭🇰 Hong Kong: 0
    🇰🇷 South Korea: 0*
    🇸🇬 Singapore: 0
    🇦🇺 Australia: 0
    🇹🇭 Thailand: 0
    🇲🇾 Malaysia: 0
    🇮🇩 Indonesia: 0
    🇵🇭 Philippines: 0

    Zero means none identified in the records reviewed (*South Korea remains provisional).

    China’s qualifier was NetEase’s William Ding, then 35. Baidu’s Robin Li and Tencent’s Pony Ma were already in China’s top 40, but below the billion-dollar threshold.

    Taiwan had Hon Hai’s Terry Gou and Quanta’s Barry Lam. Joint fortunes are excluded unless individual eligibility can be established.

    The telecom exclusion removes SoftBank’s Masayoshi Son, Hikari Tsushin’s Yasumitsu Shigeta and PCCW’s Richard Li from this historical count.

    My 2026 comparison counted eleven in China, eight each in Singapore and Australia, and one in Japan: ZOZO’s Yusaku Maezawa.

    The earlier lists cover 40 positions, versus 50 in the newer comparison; some also combined markets.

    Still, Japan’s thin younger cohort makes me pause.

    Mikitani has aged out. Japan’s count remains one.

    These snapshots cannot explain an economy’s performance. But they raise a question about the next generation of founders.

    Japan had an early digital success story. But why have so few younger founders followed at this scale?

    Source: Forbes country/regional lists; valuation dates vary. The 2026 comparison uses 2025 data for China. Energy technology excluded. Taiwan: confirmed minimum.