Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) policy chief Takayuki Kobayashi met with Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi on Friday, April 24, and delivered a series of proposals for the government’s response to the Hormuz crisis, including a call to consider dispatching minesweepers once the conflict is over. The bulk of the proposals, however, focused on measures to contain price increases and ensure adequate supplies as the crisis shows few signs of abating. (The full set of proposals is available here.) Takaichi has continued to focus on reassuring the public that the situation is under control, stating for example in the Diet Friday that the government is working on resolving bottlenecks in Japan’s distribution of naptha – even as producers have warned that shortages could lead them to scale back production.
Meanwhile, at a meeting of the cabinet committee on the situation in the Middle East Friday, the prime minister said that the government had secured oil supplies for May from alternate sources totaling roughly 60% of Japan’s May 2025 usage. She instructed her government to aim to top this figure for June. In the face of the Takaichi government’s focus on managing supplies instead of taking demand-side measures, the Centrist Reform Alliance (CRA) and its affiliated parties are calling for an early supplemental budget to address the crisis. However, as Toyo Keizai columnist Kanbee warns, despite leading indicators pointing to slowing demand, the lessons from the oil shocks of the 1970s should caution the government against relying of fiscal stimulus to aid consumers. Meanwhile, a Nikkei panel of economists favors both measures to promote conservation and reducing or phasing out gasoline subsidies.
This article is republished with permission from Tobias Harris’s newsletter Observing Japan.
