According to information released by the Japanese Ministry of Finance, Japan’s state debt reached well over ¥1 100 trillion at the end of last year.

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development had announced in 2016 that Japan’s national debt reached 219% of its GDP. With its debt kept growing like a snowball, Japan broke the peak record last year again after 2017.

Last year, over 8 200 businesses went bankrupt in Japan and the number is estimated to grow more this year due to the shortage of manpower.

As they passed the budget bill for 2019, the Japanese authorities worked out a plan to issue national bonds of some 32.6 trillion yen, saying that they could not help but issue national bonds to appropriate the social security funds which keep increasing due to population ageing.

Is it true that national debt mount due to population ageing?

The authorities plan to increase military expenditure, irrespective of the worst domestic situation in which the per capita debt is over ¥ 8.7 million.

The Abe regime is trying to sharply increase defence expenses after making public the defence programme and midterm defence programme (2019-2023) which were revised in December 18 last year with an eye to radically reforming the existing defence system. If things go as planned, a record high of 27.47 trillion yen will be disbursed for the military spending in a few years.

South Korea’s Yonhap News, Japan’s Mainichi Shimbun and other media outlets said that the Japanese government is examining a plan for increasing military expenditure within the limits of 1 percent of GDP to 1.3 percent till 2023 and thus Japan’s military spending will reach 7 trillion yen, or 40 percent rise from 5 trillion yen, in five years.

Japan ascribes the military threat from the DPRK and China and its establishment of defence posture in a new domain covering cyberspace and space to the increase in defence expenditure, but it is nothing but a trick to deceive the public.

Accordingly, Japan shows a sign of pushing ahead with a plan for introducing ground-based missile defence system Aegis Ashore, fighter jets for electronic warfare, over a hundred F-35B stealth fighters and long-range cruise missile JASSM into the Ground, Maritime and Air Self-Defence Forces in Japan.

Though the Japanese people are getting thinner, the SDF is becoming fatter.