In the global debate on energy policy, there’s a quiet divide between those who see physics as a negotiable concept and those who don’t. Japan belongs firmly in the latter camp. Europe, meanwhile, occasionally appears to think electrons respond to moral encouragement.
Tokyo’s energy policy might not be elegant, but it wins great on electricity.
The Japanese government’s decision to keep importing Russian LNG from the Sakhalin-2 project, in spite of a strong U.S. encouragement to cut ties, was not an act of rebellion; but a rational decision based on “national interest”.
That Sakhalin-2 LNG, after all, supplies roughly nine percent of Japan’s total LNG imports, and replacing it overnight is not something that can be achieved by a strongly worded communiqué, the more so as the infrastructure, the contracts, the cargoes are all part of the fabric of Japan’s energy system. (On a side note, Japan did reduce its exposure to Russian energy and joined G7 price-cap efforts on oil, but did it only cautiously, with a calendar in one hand and a calculator in the other.)
Compare that with Europe’s energy drama.
When the continent declared moral war on Russian fuel in 2022, the symbolism was magnificent. The consequences, less so.
Wholesale gas prices exploded to record highs, electricity markets convulsed, and industrial output slumped under the weight of “energy inflation.” Germany, the self-declared green powerhouse, suddenly rediscovered its affection for coal plants and stated to regret shutting its nuclear reactors.
The same policymakers who preached about “climate leadership” found themselves scrambling to buy LNG from any supplier available — including, ironically, shipments blended with Russian sources that had taken the long way around.
Meanwhile, Japan quietly re-signed long-term LNG contracts with non-Russian producers, restarted its nuclear reactors, and set a realistic energy-mix goal: 40–50 percent renewables by 2040, 20 percent nuclear, and the rest a managed combination of gas and imported fuels.
A great example of how to decarbonize a power system by encouraging investment and maintaining baseload generation while renewables scale. (A hint: tweeting about decarbonizing doesn’t qualify.)
Europe’s approach sometimes resembles a policy beauty contest: who can declare net-zero the earliest, regardless of feasibility. Targets have piled up faster than the battery storage to back them. The result? Prices that make households sweat more from their bills than from global warming.
And then there’s the loathed coal.
Europe denounced it, yet occasionally still burns it when the wind forgets to blow. Japan, for all its climate pledges and the work to phase out the dirtiest plants, remains one of the world’s largest coal importers, relying primarily on Australia (about two-thirds of total imports) and Indonesia as core suppliers.
To its credit, Europe has made progress on diversification and renewables.
Wind and solar capacity have grown impressively, and Russian pipeline gas dependency has fallen from over 40 percent pre-war to under 15 percent today.
But the transition has been messy, expensive, and politically brittle. Many countries now subsidize consumers to survive the very energy system designed to be sustainable.
Japan’s path looks dull by comparison — which is precisely why it works. Tokio didn’t replace baseload before it built alternatives, and not only because an island nation without pipelines cannot afford to improvise.
When Japan’s industry minister said the nation would “act in the national interest”, it sounded radical in Brussels. The difference is cultural as much as strategic: Japan treats energy as infrastructure; Europe treats it as ideology.
But numbers don’t lie.
Thanks to the country’s diverse supply chain, the average Japanese household pays less for electricity than its German or Danish counterparts, despite importing nearly all fossil fuels.
None of this means Japan plans to cling to fossil fuels indefinitely. The government is investing heavily in hydrogen, ammonia co-firing, offshore wind, and next-generation nuclear. But it also refuses to gamble national survival on a hypothetical breakthrough.
European planners could take a hint: moral superiority does not generate electric currents.
Of course, there is also a geopolitical subtext.
Japan’s balancing act — coordinating with G7 partners while declining to commit energy suicide — demonstrates a pragmatic realism.
Something that is often missing from European discourse, heavily focused on “strategic autonomy”, what, in reality, only meant that energy dependency whiplashed from Gazprom to global LNG traders almost overnight.
Japan, by contrast, spreads its risks and maintains long-term contracts across regions, grounding its decisions on one metric: can the system deliver stable, affordable energy tomorrow morning?
Europe’s energy piety often forgets that moral consistency is no substitute for mechanical consistency: the much hailed “green transition” or “decoupling from Russia” proves how policy outpaced infrastructure. In the name of the right vision and driven by a sense of panic, it chose the wrong sequencing and now it has to bear the consequences.
