Live side-by-side comparison of government debt. Japan currently owes about 13.3× more — a gap of $9.47 trillion. Updated every second from IMF baselines.
By total government debt, Belgium ranks 15th-largest and Japan ranks 3rd-largest among the 137 sovereigns tracked on this site.
On a per-citizen basis the picture can look different from the nominal totals: a resident's notional share of the national debt in Japan is roughly 1.3× that in Belgium ($82,632 vs $66,009 per person).
Both countries carry debt-to-GDP ratios above the 100% mark that analysts often treat as an informal threshold for closer scrutiny — Belgium at 109% and Japan at 230% — meaning each owes more than a full year's worth of national output.
The gap between them is widening: Japan's debt is growing faster in dollar terms ($4K/sec vs $900/sec for Belgium), adding roughly $285,120,000 to the difference each day.
Scale is part of the story too: Japan's population (124M) is about 10.6× Belgium's (12M), which is part of why the nominal and per-capita comparisons above can point in different directions — a government's debt load scales loosely with the size of both its economy and its population, not either alone.
This analysis is generated automatically from live data as an educational orientation, not financial advice — see the methodology page for definitions and caveats.