Since James David Brown offers no examples for his suggestion, I will leave it to people who better understand the global, regional, and national market for natural gas, Japanese government support for overseas energy projects, Russian governance issues, and the history of the bilateral relationship USSR/Russia-Japan (I think that I've forgotten anything, but never mind) to make up their own minds about them. Actually, it would interesting and useful work to produce such a paper.for a fee. As for his conjecture that "[w]ith Japan now suffering an energy crisis,. Japanese policymakers may becompelled to more actively pursue relations with Russia in the energy field, even if this means taking a softer line on the territorial dispute", yes, of course, as with all relations in the energy field with all gas producers, including Canada and the United States. But we don't have to take a softer line on the territorial dispute because the Russians, unlike the South Koreans with regard to Takeshima, could care less about what we think about it.

I apologize to James David Brown for having been sarcastic when I mentioned that Japan is not a command economy, but I remind everyone that I did it to emphasize the point that one had to disaggregate Japan into its various actors to begin to understand and explain an issue of any complexity.