A country with highly limited access to natural energy resources, Japan has a long history of deploying economic statecraft to shore up energy security. In recent years, Japanese state institutions have invested extensively into the domestic production of renewables in response to the 2011 Fukushima disaster, intensifying tensions between China and the US, the COVID pandemic, and the Russian attack on Ukraine. What factors and dynamics shape Japan’s geoeconomic policy approach to green industries and the energy transition more broadly? The existing International Relations (IR) and International Political Economy (IPE) literatures have predominantly conceptualized Japan as pursuing a top-down form of ‘green’ economic statecraft that seeks to bolster technological sovereignty and energy security. In combination with the broader economic security agenda in Japan, this approach is frequently reinterpreted as translating into a revitalization of the Cold War-era Japanese ‘developmental state’ and/or the reassertion of new state capitalist powers in Japan. Drawing on new fieldwork data gathered during fieldwork stints in Japan in 2025 and 2026, this paper conversely argues that the scope and effectiveness of green economic statecraft in Japan is decisively conditioned by the objectives of leading Japanese energy companies and multinationals. Leading Japanese corporations shape the green economic statecraft agenda both formally and informally, thus informing how statecraft is exercised, for instance by pushing by state institutions toward hydrogen-based solutions. At the same time, Japanese corporations actively and often successfully undermine green economic statecraft agendas that do not match their corporate preferences. Japan’s policy approach to green industries and the green transition is thus heavily shaped by corporate interests and does not reflect a neat top-down exercise of economic statecraft. The Japanese cases demonstrates that domestic state-capital relations play a key role in shaping how and how effectively state institutions can exercise economic statecraft, including in the context of the green transition.
