The newly elected Prime Minister of Japan, Sanae Takaichi, told Donald Trump, the U.S. President, at their meeting in Tokyo recently that Japan is going to find it difficult to ban LNG imports from Russia. The Japanese government officials told this to Reuters on October 29, 2025.
Apparently, Trump visited Japan and held bilateral talks along with Takaichi as well as other top Japanese officials. The two leaders did praise a new golden age when it comes to the ever-growing U.S.-Japan Alliance and also inked a framework agreement so as to support the mining and processing of critical minerals as well as rare earths as they look forward to countering the dominance of China in the industry.
But before the summit, the U.S. asked Japan to decrease and eventually cut off its imports of Russian energy.
The issue to ban LNG imports from Russia came up during the meeting between the U.S. president and Japan’s prime minister, with the latter seeking understanding from the U.S. administration on Japanese energy security, as per the sources from Reuters.
It is well to be noted that Japan goes on to import Russian LNG from the Sakhalin-2 project, where the Japanese firms like Mitsui as well as Mitsubishi hold minority stakes, which they went on to keep even after Russia’s war with Ukraine. This was due to the significance of LNG supply for Japan.
Apparently, the Russian LNG comprises almost 9% of the total liquefied natural gas imports to Japan.
Interestingly, on the eve of Trump’s visit to Japan, the U.S. went on to reiterate calls on its allies, which included the likes of Japan too, to go ahead and stop importing energy products from Russia.
Japan went on to respond that it would go ahead and base any sort of decisions pertaining to energy imports upon its national interests, following the suggestions coming from the Trump Administration that Japan go ahead and suspend all Russian oil and gas purchases.
The fact is that the Trump administration has begun a pressure campaign against all the large importers when it comes to Russian hydrocarbons on the grounds that when depriving Russia of energy exports, the revenues would also get reduced, and hence there will be a dip in their financial means, which is helping them to fight the Ukrainian forces.
