I've always been interested in the CEO culture difference between Japan and the rest of the world. I've been surfing on the web and try to make a thread about are Japanese CEOs under-paid? Or the CEOs of the rest of the world over-paid?

the huge differences. Sadly not all the sources are up to date. 

2010:

Japanese securities regulators began “requiring Japanese companies to disclose pay for executives making more than 100 million yen ($1.1 million).” 

pay for Japanese executives has more than doubled in the past decade, the government says, fewer than 300 people at Japan’s 3,813 public companies earned enough in 2009 to require disclosure, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers. 

Companies listed on Japan’s stock exchanges paid their chief executives an average of $580,000 in salary and other compensation last fiscal year, PWC estimates, about 16 times more than the typical Japanese worker. 

Average CEO pay at the 3,000 largest U.S. companies is $3.5 million, including stock options and bonuses, according to the Corporate Library, a research group.

While Japan maintains a relatively low CEO-to-worker pay ratio, the average American CEO now earns 319 times as much as the average American worker. Conservatives often argue that the high level of compensation American executives receive is due to a high level of performance.

"It's a reminder that CEOs aren't just paid what the market will bear, they're paid what the culture will accept."

http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2010/07/08/106536/japanese-ceo-american-sixth/

Highest paid CEO in Japan.

Nissan Motor Co.’s Carlos Ghosn, among Japan’s highest-paid CEOs, earned 988 million yen ($12 million) in the year ended March 2013, little changed from the previous year. That wouldn’t even put him among the top 100 U.S. company chiefs, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-06-24/toyota-president-delivers-highest-returns-for-lowest-pay.html

Here you can get an idea how much the CEO/Worker pay gap is in your country. In America the difference is huge. The CEO of an S&P 500 Index company made, on average, 354 times the average wage of a rank-and-file U.S. worker in 2012.

http://www.aflcio.org/Corporate-Watch/CEO-Pay-and-You/CEO-to-Worker-Pay-Gap-in-the-United-States/Pay-Gaps-in-the-World

What are your thoughts? 

Edit: delete post

Who cares if there rich? what does it matter? should people be punished,just because there rich and successful? I'm not that rich,but I don't blame anybody,but myself for it and I'm not going to be envious of anybody that is. Just my opinion.

The issue people have isn't that others are rich, it's that some people's wealth is incredibly disproportinate to what they have actually achieved where as other people are underpaid.

As for the topic, I think the Japanese have it right

again,what does it matter? that's just the way it is,in any company. I work at walmart and probably do more work then the president of the whole company and and nameless excutive that you never see,but I'm not going to hold a grudge and get worked up over it. If people want those high level positions so bad,then why don't they just kiss alot of ass and try to get it. People like to complain about this,but they don't want to do anything to change there own situation. Most people are content with staying in there little bubble. I'm personally content to stay within my bubble,so I can't cry about ceo's making millions of dollars,while I'm making $15 an hour. Sorry about the long post,just giving my thoughts.

@ bolded - I'm not saying anyone should hold a grudge because that won't get you anywhere, but what you said is exactly what annoys other people.  But if you're not bothered and happy, then fair enough.  That's fine too.

Its both. There is a lot of research done on CEO pay actually.

A lot of it is pretty terrible because it doesn't take into account what the companies actually do, the size of the companies etc....

but there is still some basic rules you can draw from it.

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2159119

Is a pretty detailed analaysis you can DL for free.

The average worker gets considerably better wages in Japan than America but the culture and the structure is very different too. If anything, CEO's should get the most but American CEO's just take the piss. They hoard the wealth to themselves. Why else would pay go up so much for the 1% since 1980 but remain stagnant for everyone else? It's just greed and I think between wealth hoarding and the huge amounts of tax evasion, they are damaging western economies big time.

In Japan, if the company does poorly, the CEO gets a pay cut. In America or the west in general, he or she seems to get rewarded regardless of their performance. That is a big problem.

I mean... maybe you have different numbers

I'm seeing Median income by PPP being about 33% higher in the US.

Meaning the average worker in the US makes WAY more money.

A low end worker makes more in Japan... but a low end near minimium wage worker is not your average worker.

Additionally, pay for everyone else hasn't stayed stagnat since the 1980's.  Wages have... total compensation hasn't.

Starting from the 1980's onword there was a push (by government) to change benefit increases from wages to other benefits, such as free healthcare.

As such you tend to just see people misrepresent the truth by using a "Total Wages" graph... instead of a "Total Comensation" graph.

A total compensation graph looks more like this.