Live side-by-side comparison of government debt. Japan currently owes about 28.2× more — a gap of $9.88 trillion. Updated every second from IMF baselines.
By total government debt, South Africa ranks 27th-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 14.1× that in South Africa ($82,632 vs $5,859 per person).
The debt-to-GDP picture is asymmetric here: Japan sits at 230% of GDP, well above South Africa's 79%, 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 $800/sec for South Africa), adding roughly $293,760,000 to the difference each day.
Scale is part of the story too: Japan's population (124M) is about 2.0× South Africa's (62M), 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.