Japan's Lonely Child

Rejoice! Japan just gave birth to a healthy, happy baby.

Its new parents, including Mitsui & Co. and Development Bank of Japan, report that baby Mercari is ``rapidly growing'' and has just sprouted a horn, confirming its status as the first unicorn in the Land of the Rising Sun.

At 32 million downloads and with operations in Japan and the U.S., Mercari is a marketplace app that connects buyers and sellers of second-hand goods. Mitsui calls it a flea market, an apt description, and joined an 8.4 billion yen ($74 million) Series D round. According to TechCrunch, this funding values it at more than $1 billion, the definition of a unicorn.

Being Japan's only child, Mercari is likely to be alone in the unicorn playground for a few years to come.

That the world's third-largest economy, and one of its most highly educated and tech-savvy, has just one startup worth $1 billion beggars belief. China has 25 and even India has seven, according to CB Insights.

The problem isn't that the nation's nascent businesses aren't getting funding or achieving sky-high valuations, it's simply that Japanese startups, like its babies, aren't being born at all.

Japan's startup rate is the second-lowest in the world, ahead of only Suriname (population: 580,000). Just 3.8 percent of Japanese aged 18 to 64 are starting, or have started, a business in the past three-and-a-half years, according to the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor, which tracks entrepreneurship across more than 100 countries covering 90 percent of the world's GDP. Suriname, with a GDP approximately 1/500th of Japan, comes in at 2.1 percent.