And that excludes the value of their home.
According to Nomura Research Institute (NRI), an estimated 1.653 million Japanese households met that threshold in 2023.
The definition matters: financial assets such as deposits, shares and investment funds, minus liabilities. Property values are excluded. Debts, including mortgages, are still deducted.
But what caught my attention was who some of these households were.
NRI identified ordinary salaried workers, often in their late forties and fifties, whose investments had grown enough to bring them into the wealthy category.
Some had built their portfolios through employee share plans, defined-contribution pensions and NISA, Japan’s tax-advantaged investment accounts.
Their financial position had changed. Their everyday lives often had not.
NRI describes these households as continuing to live within their salaries, maintaining much the same lifestyles as before.
You might notice a colleague’s promotion. You are much less likely to notice the portfolio they have been building alongside their career.
That is why I find the distinction between “employees” and “asset owners” less useful than it first appears.
The same person can be both.
A salary tells us what someone earns from work. A job title tells us what they do. Neither tells us much about what they own.
There are limits to this story. Rising markets helped these households cross the threshold; falling markets can reverse that. These findings do not mean that every worker has money left to invest, or that all wealthy households built their assets from salaries.
But they reveal a side of Japan that salary comparisons alone tend to miss.
For some households, employment has financed a growing ownership stake in businesses, allowing them to share in growth that never appears on a payslip.
(Source: Nomura Research Institute, February 2025; estimates for 2023. Illustrative exchange rate: USD 1 = JPY 150.)
