Japan Press Weekly

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2016 March 30 - April 5 [ECONOMY]

One so-called super rich owns as much wealth as 100,000 average income households in Japan

Japanese Communist Party parliamentarian Koike Akira on March 29 at a House of Councilors Budget Committee meeting said that under “Abenomics”, the economic disparity is growing in Japan and that a super-rich person has the wealth as equivalent to 100,000 average households.

A Bank of Japan survey shows that the percentage of those who have no savings increased from 26.0% in 2012 to 30.9% in 2015 among households with two or more members and from 33.8% to 47.6% among single-member households. During the same period of time, the number of families with no financial assets went up by 4.7 million to a record high of 18.92 million.

In contrast, “Forbes” magazine has calculated that the total amount of wealth possessed by Japan’s 40 richest more than doubled from 7.2 trillion yen in 2012 to 15.9 trillion yen in 2015.

Koike pointed out that the average asset for the top 40 individuals in Japan is equivalent to a total of assets held by 100,000 average income households and that those 40 people have as much money and property as the bottom 53% of all households. He urged the prime minister to acknowledge that Abenomics created the concentration in the wealth to a handful of billionaires.

PM Abe merely said that it is impossible for the richest 1% to take in all the wealth in Japan.

Stressing that the failure of Abenomics is obvious, Koike called for a radical change in economic policies in order to create a fair and more equitable society