Non Sequitur - Japan v. Russia

I was musing geopolitik today and wondered about the world's largest countries by economy, land mass, and population. Among the standard pool of top contenders, an interesting comparison came to mind: Japan v. Russia.

GDP World Rank
Japan is #2
Russia is #8

Size
Japan covers 374,744 sq km
Russia covers 16,995,800 sq km

Population
Japan has 127,288,416 people
Russia has 140,702,096 people

So here's the punchline:

Japan's economy is roughly 3x the size of Russia's economy, however Japan only has 2% the land mass of Russia, which is the largest country in the world in terms of land mass AND Russia's population is only 1.1x greater than Japan's - nearly the same number of people in both countries!

Additionally, 13.7% of Russia's population is 65+yrs compared with Japan's 22%. The average life expectancy in Russia is 66yrs, while Japan has one of the highest average life expectancies at 82yrs!

So who wins in Japan v. Russia? The island nation of Japan has some compelling figures for it's relatively small size, however, it's military spending as a % of GDP is only 0.8% compared with Russia's 3.9%. Considering that Japan's not allowed to have a strong military per the 1947 Constitution and for post WWII cultural reasons you could say the USA + a small native defense force, is the de facto military for Japan. Since the USA's % military spending is 4.06% I'm going to go ahead and give the win in this country comparison to Japan.

*data comes from 2008 & 2009 estimates on www.cia.gov and 2008 IMF estimates.