Live side-by-side comparison of government debt. Japan currently owes about 35.3× more — a gap of $9.96 trillion. Updated every second from IMF baselines.
By total government debt, Portugal ranks 31st-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 2.9× that in Portugal ($82,632 vs $28,162 per person).
The debt-to-GDP picture is asymmetric here: Japan sits at 230% of GDP, well above Portugal's 90%, meaning Japan owes far more relative to the size of its own economy — even where the nominal, dollar-for-dollar comparison above suggests otherwise.
The gap between them is widening: Japan's debt is growing faster in dollar terms ($4K/sec vs $200/sec for Portugal), adding roughly $345,600,000 to the difference each day.
Scale is part of the story too: Japan's population (124M) is about 12.0× Portugal's (10M), 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.