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Introduction
This paper will show that Japan, just like the majority of other countries, has no policy on global warming per se. Instead, Japan’s policies and measures on climate change mitigation are formulated by adjusting the country’s energy policy. The oil shocks prove that the Japanese government does have the ability to dramatically alter its energy policy, provided it regards the challenge as legitimate and rises to the responsibility to respond to it, but the institutionalization of some of the solutions to the crises of the 1970s prevent this. Contemporary Japanese energy policy is therefore blinkered to some extent, hobbling the effectiveness of the Japanese response to climate change.
In exploring what factors affect the success of the Japanese government’s policies this paper looks at the documents articulating the instruments called upon to respond to these crises. This includes not only laws, but also plans, strategies and outlooks, which may offer details about the general direction of policy, stipulate envisaged targets, or specify concrete measures that, for whatever reason, were not mentioned in legal texts. While all subsequent government activity is theoretically required to be in compliance with the thus formulated documents , their specificity is critical, as they may be left purposefully ambiguous if this suits the interests of the government agencies compiling them , or if a consensus about how to deploy the policy does not exist among the most important stakeholders.
The experience of the two crises discussed in this paper confirms the need for specificity in the framing of policy. The paper’s first two sections discuss the evolution of the response to each of these crises. The third section shows that the failings of the later plan stem at least partially from the successes of the previous one and makes some suggestions about how to overcome the current limitations of the Japanese efforts on climate change mitigation. The final section offers some conjectures as to Japan’s future approach to the international climate negotiations are offered.