Household electricity bills in Japan set to fall in July due to subsidies
The nation's 10 major electricity suppliers said Friday that power bills for standard households will fall by between ¥520 and ¥691 in July from the previous month.
Behind the drop is a resumption of government subsidies to cut electricity costs from July to September, when the use of air conditioners spikes.
Falls in prices of liquefied natural gas will also contribute to the decline in electricity bills.
The subsidies will be ¥2 per kilowatt-hour of electricity consumed in July and September and ¥2.4 per kilowatt-hour in August.
Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings and Kansai Electric Power define a standard household as one consuming 260 kilowatt-hours of electricity per month. Given that, the subsidies alone are projected to push down the bills for such households for July by ¥520.
For Tepco, the July bill for a standard household will decrease by ¥616 to ¥8,236, while Kansai Electric expects a drop of ¥520 to ¥7,271.
Subsidies are also set to be reflected in city gas bills, by ¥8 per cubic meter in July and September and ¥10 per cubic meter in August.
The subsidies will push down the gas bills of four major suppliers, including Tokyo Gas, by between ¥241 and ¥318 for July.
Subsidies for electricity and gas bills began in January 2023 as a temporary measure in response to soaring fuel costs following Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
The program was halted and restarted several times. The last time it was implemented was from January to March this year.
The government plans to spend ¥288.1 billion from its fiscal 2025 budget reserves for the electricity and gas subsidies.
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The Diplomat
15 minutes ago
- The Diplomat
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The historical issues in East Asia have long been a blindspot for the United States. Time to start paying attention. As Prime Minister Ishiba Shigeru prepares for the 80th anniversary of Japan's surrender in World War II this August, the United States must, for the first time, fully recognize and respond to the geopolitical implications underpinning these commemorative cycles. While Washington tends to dismiss these disputes as political theater secondary to power politics, Beijing continues its decades-long campaign of systematically collecting, digitizing, and analyzing Japanese wartime records and military writings. This historical infrastructure provides insights into Tokyo's postwar defense establishment, reinforces China's broader nationalistic narrative, and expands Beijing's regional interests – yet Washington fails to recognize the full extent to which China weaponizes historical narratives in order to isolate Japan and weaken U.S. alliances and partnerships across Asia. As Tokyo's role in the Indo-Pacific evolves, Washington's assumption that Japan – constitutionally restricted from maintaining military forces and shaped by decades of antimilitarist constraints and pacifist public sentiment – is fundamentally divorced from its pre-1945 strategic tradition creates dangerous vulnerabilities for alliance management and regional strategy. These vulnerabilities demand a new strategy and vigorous diplomatic effort. Misreading History in the China-Japan Rivalry These strategic vulnerabilities have deep roots. During the 1990s, bilateral security trends between Japan and China received relatively little attention. The general absence of major bilateral disputes or direct military confrontation during this period – combined with the fact that the Japan-U.S. alliance itself has often obscured Japan's own security posture, sometimes deliberately, by serving as both a buffer and interpretive lens for regional dynamics – can partially explain this lack of analytical focus. Yet underlying Sino-Japanese pressure persisted in what Japanese analysts would later describe as a state of sustained 'low altitude flight' (teikū hikō) based on confrontation and distrust. While the late 20th century neglect was perhaps understandable, this analytical blind spot's endurance cannot be justified. This period of sustained tensions was punctuated by insufficient U.S. responses to Japan's history problems. During the 2005 textbook controversy, when China erupted in massive anti-Japanese protests over textbook revisions minimizing Japanese wartime atrocities, official U.S. attempts at intervention failed to effectively intermediate. Recurring disputes over Japanese leaders' visits to Yasukuni Shrine – which controversially honors convicted war criminals alongside Japan's war dead – exemplified the United States' diplomatic limitations. Washington, for example, could muster only tepid diplomatic 'disappointment' when Prime Minister Abe Shinzo proceeded with his own controversial visit despite high level appeals from the Obama administration in 2013. In the 'comfort women' dispute, Japan's controversial approach to its own wartime responsibility for sexual slavery in Korea remains largely unresolved. U.S. pressure for a quick diplomatic resolution – the 2015 Japan-South Korea agreement – alienated survivors and triggered diplomatic backlash that undermined the accord's implementation. These and other recurring tensions and missteps, persisting despite U.S. intervention and Japanese concessions, reveal a deeper challenge: the inability of U.S. policymakers to fully recognize the drivers of such regional strain. Washington's mismanagement culminated in its response to Abe's August 2015 statement marking Japan's 70th surrender anniversary. While Abe had publicly pledged during his April 2015 U.S. visit to uphold the 1993 Kono Statement officially apologizing to comfort women, his August assertion that future generations shouldn't be 'predestined to apologize' signaled a shift in Japan's approach. U.S. officials responded positively to Abe's statement, despite predictable regional fallout with Japan's neighbors. This diplomatic misstep undermined trilateral security coordination precisely when North Korean threats and Chinese incursions demanded it. As Ishiba prepares to navigate the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II, he now inherits this decades-long challenge. Ishiba's Anniversary Strategy As early as January 2025, Ishiba recognized the 80th anniversary as a predominant challenge of his early tenure, despite fumbling and recently recovering approval ratings. He has proposed an expert panel to examine the war's origins. This approach allows him to sidestep a formal Cabinet statement and instead minimize personal association with the issue by issuing a message to the public based on the findings of this panel. Ishiba's April 2025 visit to the Philippines War Memorial revealed the uneasiness in his approach. His observation that 'they haven't forgotten' Japan's wartime actions acknowledges regional wounds that persist eight decades later. Yet his government's proposed war panel appears to analyze primarily procedural questions and policy failures – what Komeito party leader Saito Tetsuo described as examining 'why Japan plunged into a war where many died and why it couldn't be stopped' – not moral responsibility. Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Lin Jian, in contrast, demanded that Japan 'deeply reflect on its historical guilt' while citing Ishiba's November 2024 pledge to 'look to the future, facing history squarely.' Beijing commands this gap between acknowledging history and accepting guilt – and it will maintain this territory regardless of Tokyo's approach. What Japan has traditionally treated as diplomacy, China wields as strategy. Yet Ishiba's strategy seems to further break a pattern set by his predecessors. Prime Minister Murayama Tomiichi's 1995 statement at the 50th anniversary established a template of expressing 'deep remorse' and 'heartfelt apology' for Japan's wartime aggression – language that Prime Minister Koizumi Junichiro maintained at the 60th anniversary in 2005. Ten years later, Abe's 2015 approach marked a sea change in this cycle, emphasizing instead Japan's evolving international role while attempting to curtail the cycle of apology. Ishiba's focus, in contrast, appears to be on process and examining wartime decision-making rather than addressing moral culpability, which positions him farther from Murayama's acceptance of guilt and closer to the strategic autonomy that has emerged from Japan's expanding security leadership in the Indo-Pacific under Abe's vision. Yet, importantly, behind Ishiba's mask of analytical neutrality lies a drift in Japan's grand strategy: nationalist narratives muted by procedural distance, quietly assuming Japanese leadership as U.S. power recedes – a shift that helps explain Beijing's efforts at controlling international narratives. Beijing's Memory Politics While Japan crafts new narratives of regional leadership, China has spent decades building the historical arsenal to counter them – translating, studying, and cataloging Japanese war materials that serve Beijing's strategic objectives regardless of Tokyo's diplomatic approach. For Beijing, mastering historical narratives stands equal to technological and economic dominance in securing China's rise to great power status – a strategy evidenced by the Chinese Ministry of State Security's 2021 analysis 'National Security and the Rise and Fall of Great Powers.' This document shows that China studies Japan's path from wartime collapse to postwar growth to map its own rise and navigate around avoidable pitfalls while undermining Tokyo's current position. Beijing does this not to settle scores, but to amplify its own advantages – a game Tokyo is only recently learning to play. Beijing's systematic preservation of wartime records is worth understanding because it both exemplifies China's priorities and serves its strategic intelligence needs – monitoring what officials like Senior Colonel Wu Qian, director general of the Information Office of the Ministry of National Defense, describe as the lingering 'specter of militarism' in Japan's modern defense posture. China leverages this strategy to both elevate its own great power status while creating a self-reinforcing internal narrative focused on historical justice and national resurgence. Institutionalizing China's Historical Infrastructure Marshal Xu Xiangqian's 1979 speech at the Central Military Commission symposium established an institutional mandate that defined China's historical intelligence apparatus. One of his core directives required Chinese military cadres to study foreign histories of World War II to prepare for modern warfare, explicitly linking historical analysis with strategic advantage. This high-level mandate stimulated a major research effort by Chinese military education institutions and civilian universities to translate and analyze works of Japanese strategic and military thought. From approximately 1980 to 2010, Chinese academies published over 700 translations of foreign military texts on World War II, while institutions including the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, the Academy of Military Science, and the National Defense University began offering graduate degrees in military history. This translation infrastructure grants Chinese military decisionmakers what Ma Jun of the Chinese National Defense University called a 'rich knowledge of historical studies, and a strong ability to draw insights.' Meanwhile, such foundational Japanese military thought and historical documents are largely unknown and inaccessible to Japan's English-speaking allies. Further, China operationalizes its memory politics through memorial institutions, legal documentation, and strategic research, then deploys this historical knowledge through not just military training but confrontational diplomacy and coordinated public narratives. The Nanjing Massacre Memorial Hall exemplifies Beijing's public approach, gradually transforming since its establishment in 1985 from memorialization into a celebration of 'national rejuvenation' under Xi Jinping. Beijing has long weaponized the facility's presence, including recently introducing new documentary evidence of Japanese atrocities, and maintains its international visibility and access to transform historical preservation into political leverage. Beijing applies the same strategic historiography to the Tokyo War Crimes Trials. Treatment of these proceedings remained largely neglected until China began entrenching its own historical interpretation of the trials. In 2011, Shanghai Jiao Tong University established a Center for the Tokyo Trial Studies, readily surpassing any similar institution in Japan or elsewhere internationally. The center collects, translates, and publishes Tribunal documents from the 1940s, making them widely available online. Most notably, during heightened tensions over Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands territorial disputes in 2016, the center launched one of the world's most comprehensive, multilingual online depositories of trial records and evidence to date. As just these few significant examples aptly demonstrate, Beijing has spent decades learning to read and weaponize Japan's strategic identity and history while Washington barely grasps how its ally thinks, much less where it's heading. Conclusion The knowledge asymmetry between the United States and China – compounded by Washington's failure to recognize Japan's own evolving grand strategy – creates three immediate vulnerabilities for U.S. strategy in Asia. First, it erodes effective alliance management when Japanese security decisions and postures are interpreted differently by U.S. and Chinese officials, creating the potential for dangerous misalignment during crises. Second, it risks undermining Japan's leadership ambitions while ceding narrative advantage to Beijing in multilateral fora where historical context shapes regional receptiveness to competing security frameworks. Third, it leaves Washington both ill-equipped to counter Chinese political offensives that strategically weaponize historical Sino-Japanese grievances and inclined to prioritize short-term alliance goals over addressing deeper historical tensions, U.S. retrenchment, or broader strategic evolutions in the region. Beijing's historical memory politics will test these vulnerabilities as Ishiba navigates the upcoming 80th anniversary of the end of World War II. While China's decades of strategic preparation provide significant advantages, Washington can still address these asymmetries through targeted policy adjustments. Most fundamentally, the United States must demonstrate sustained commitment to alliance management with Japan through both concrete actions and public statements that reassure Tokyo of Washington's staying power. Only then must the United States and Japan develop integrated intelligence capabilities to counter Beijing, creating bilateral initiatives that challenge China's monopoly on interpreting Japanese strategic thought for regional audiences while building U.S. expertise. Washington, alongside Tokyo, must anticipate and prepare for Beijing's historical offensives, developing proactive anniversary strategies and multilateral coordination mechanisms that prevent China from exploiting commemorative cycles to drive wedges between the United States and Japan. U.S. retreat increasingly drives Japan toward autonomy, if not outright isolation. Without reform, Beijing will exploit this upcoming anniversary to accelerate that drift while Washington will remain blind to what drives apart one of its most important Asian alliances.
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Why Did Japan Skip the NATO Summit?
On June 23, Japanese Prime Minister Ishiba Shigeru canceled his attendance at the NATO summit held in The Hague from June 24 to 25. Ishiba had originally planned to attend to 'reaffirm with NATO allies and others the recognition that the security of Euro-Atlantic and Indo-Pacific is inseparable,' according to an announcement from the Foreign Ministry. The Foreign Ministry cited 'various circumstances' for Ishiba's cancelation, which came a day after the U.S. strikes on Iranian nuclear sites. Japan – along with the other Indo-Pacific 4 (IP4) countries, South Korea, Australia, and New Zealand – were invited to the annual NATO summit, as they have been every year since Russia's invasion of Ukraine. This year was the first time since then-Prime Minister Kishida Fumio attended in 2022 that the Japanese prime minister skipped the NATO summit. Foreign Minister Iwaya Takeshi attended the summit instead. During his 30-minute meeting with NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte, the two sides welcomed the progress in Japan-NATO relations since Rutte's visit to Tokyo in April, and 'concurred to work together to elevate the Japan-NATO cooperation to a new height in various fields, including the defense industry.' In a notable setback for this goal, however, a NATO official confirmed that NATO was not currently discussing opening a Tokyo liaison office. Japan had been pursuing such an office to strengthen ties with NATO at least since spring 2023, but France had opposed it due to concerns about China's backlash. Germany was also cautious. Also at the NATO summit, Iwaya had a 10-minute meeting with U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, where they both agreed to support the ministerial-level negotiations on tariffs between the two countries and confirmed that they would communicate closely to maintain the Israel-Iran ceasefire. The 'various circumstances' alluded to with regards to Ishiba's cancelation likely included the U.S. strike on Iran – which would make a Japan-U.S. bilateral summit meeting difficult to schedule – and the decisions of Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and South Korean President Lee Jae-myung to not attend – which made an IP4-U.S. summit meeting impossible. (New Zealand's prime minister was the only top leader from the IP4 countries present.) Another consideration is the upper house elections in Japan, now scheduled for July 20. Some in Japan have criticized Ishiba for not attending, arguing that the prime minister should have tried harder to get other regional countries to attend. Even with hindsight, it can be difficult to know what the right course of action was, but the limited amount of time between the U.S. strikes on Iran and the start of the summit would have severely constrained Ishiba's freedom of maneuver, even if Albanese and Lee would have been receptive to foreign interference. Such criticism also seems to miss how dramatically the world has changed since the NATO summit of 2022, when Japan was shoulder-to-shoulder with its sole ally rallying international opinion against Russia's war. The NATO summit of 2025 occurred in a context where the U.S. has backtracked on support for Ukraine, and Japan faced a dilemma over how to respond to its ally's actions in Iran. Another possible reason that Ishiba stayed home was continued disagreement between the United States and Japan over Tokyo's defense spending and ample signals that allies' defense spending would be a key theme at the NATO summit. Japan is on track to meet its stated goal of spending 2 percent of its GDP on national security-related spending by 2027. According to a June 20 Financial Times report, however, a sudden demand from Washington for Tokyo to increase defense spending still further led Japan to cancelled the annual '2+2' security dialogue between the Japanese and U.S. foreign affairs and defense chiefs scheduled for July 1 in Washington, DC. However, it is unclear whether the meeting was 'canceled' or 'postponed.' From Japan's perspective, part of the problem is the ever-shifting goalposts for defense spending. U.S. officials have at times urged different benchmarks for defense spending, from 3 percent to 3.5 percent or even 5 percent of GDP. Earlier, in his written response to questions from U.S. senators, then-nominee for under secretary of defense for policy Elbridge Colby (who has since been confirmed) had answered that Japan should spend 'at least 3 percent of GDP on defense as soon as possible.' Following the agreement at the NATO summit that members will increase their defense and related spending to 5 percent of GDP, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt answered a reporter's question about U.S. Asia-Pacific allies: 'If our allies in Europe and our NATO allies can do it, I think our allies and our friends in the Asia-Pacific region can do it as well.' Following the NATO summit, a senior Japanese government official acknowledged, 'There's no doubt that the United States will step up its demands.' An expert panel is currently reviewing the next Defense Buildup Program within the Ministry of Defense, and there is a widespread view within the ministry that increasing Japan's defense spending is inevitable given the severe security environment. However, it is still unclear where the additional funding would come from. The previous Kishida Cabinet had decided to raise income taxes to achieve the 2 percent target yet the timing for the tax hike has not been determined yet.
