Energy Policy in Japan: Revisiting Radical Incrementalism

This chapter examines major changes in Japan’s energy system, focusing on the period since the March 11 Fukushima disaster. There remain numerous opportunities to describe and explain how politics is affecting the incremental but radical changes in the Japanese energy system. While the Japanese government continues to place concerns about security of energy supplies at the center of energy policy, climate change is the defining challenge for the Japanese government, and energy use is at the center of Japan’s greenhouse gas emissions profile. This chapter offers a sectoral analysis of the direction and degree of change evident across nuclear power, renewable energy, coal, electrification, and transport. A key question is the extent to which the politics of energy is democratizing, understood both in terms of an increased ability to influence siting choices for large centralized energy assets and directly owning or using sources of distributed renewable energy such as rooftop solar power.