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Bloom Energy Japan Versus Abe's Road: What Energy Future for Japan?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 May 2025

Andrew DeWit
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On July 18, Japan's Softbank announced that it has formed a partnership with US Bloom Energy to enter the Japanese market and proceed from there through Asia. The good news comes at a time when an election victory prompts PM Abe Shinzo to embark on a bold and risky agenda of constitutional revision, military expansion and heightened conflict with China. Back in the early 2000s, Softbank CEO Son Masayoshi blazed a trail that led Japan to having the among the fastest and cheapest internet services in the world. Abe and Son appear to represent polar opposites in their approach to development, independence and power. In this short piece, I argue that while analysts have been dazzled by Abe's electoral triumph, Son's resilient and internationalist road could shape a very different and positive Japanese economic, technological and energy future than that envisaged by the PM.

Type
Research Article
Information
Asia-Pacific Journal , Volume 10 , Issue 54 , December 2012 , e150
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BYCreative Common License - NCCreative Common License - ND
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is unaltered and is properly cited. The written permission of Cambridge University Press must be obtained for commercial re-use or in order to create a derivative work.
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 2012

Footnotes

Between 2012 and 2014 we posted a number of articles on contemporary affairs without giving them volume and issue numbers or dates. Often the date can be determined from internal evidence in the article, but sometimes not. We have decided retrospectively to list all of them as Volume 10, Issue 54 with a date of 2012 with the understanding that all were published between 2012 and 2014.' As footnote