Tokyo Report | Diplomacy | East Asia

The Contradictions Shaping Japan’s Russia Policy 

Will Japan’s Russia policy shift again – or settle into ambiguity?

Then-Japanese Prime Minister Abe Shinzo (left) and Russian President Vladimir Putin attend a joint press conference in Moscow, Russia, on Jan. 22 2019.

Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 could be regarded as a critical juncture, when Japan’s security policy made a significant departure from the past. Since then, Japan has put itself on course to nearly double its defense spending, acquired long-range missile capabilities that could strike foreign territory, and most recently greenlit the possibility of exporting lethal weapons to conflict zones. 

All of these major developments in Japan’s security policy history crossed long-standing thresholds that had previously been maintained tenaciously, and they have done so without major public pushback. This reflects a shifting perception among the Japanese public that Ukraine, suffering the onslaught today, could in fact be Japan itself in the future. 

Along with Japan’s pacifist security policies, conciliatory diplomacy toward Russia – once a hallmark of Abe Shinzo’s approach – also faded. Abe had conceived a strategy in which a joint economic program could incentivize Russia to return the disputed Northern Territories (administered by Russia as the Kuril Islands) and conclude a peace treaty, thereby potentially weakening the growing China-Russia alignment. However, the scheme ultimately came to naught. The stalemate in territorial negotiations made it easier for Japan to align its post-2022 sanctions – far firmer than those imposed following the 2014 annexation of Crimea – with those of Western democratic states, whose leaders committed to supporting Ukraine for as long as necessary. 

However, for Japan and other Western states, supporting Ukraine indefinitely did not mean doing so at significant cost to their own interests. While facing mounting pressure to reconsider, Japan has continued its imports of LNG from the Sakhalin-2 project in Russia’s Far East. And while the European Union, which has ramped up its military aid to Ukraine since the inauguration of the second Trump administration, has put forward a plan to phase out Russian gas, Japan has continued to extend its reliance on it. 

In addition, while Japan has yet to see any progress on a negotiated settlement on the territorial issue and a peace treaty, Japanese prime ministers since the 2022 Russian invasion have still not given up on this elusive quest. Seven months after the outbreak of the full-scale war in Ukraine, then-Prime Minister Kishida Fumio declared that “Russia’s aggression shakes the very foundations of the international order.” He went on to affirm, however, that Japan “will continue to uphold our policy of resolving the territorial issue and concluding a peace treaty” with Russia. 

The Japanese leaders who followed Kishida – Ishiba Shiergu and now Takaichi Sanae – have used near-identical language to describe their governments’ continued determination to resolve issues that trace their origins to the closing battles of World War II.

Japan has thus far maintained a posture in which Tokyo supports Ukraine while avoiding a........

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