The Shifting Geopolitics of Energy Security in East Asia: Policy Change and the Future of LNG in Japan and Korea

The US shale revolution and the aftermath of the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster has encouraged many countries to formulate new energy policy strategies which are not only eco-friendly but sustainable as well. This has resulted in countries taking the initiative to phase-out nuclear power and adopting natural gas which has low pollutant emission and hence its competitive price. Korea and Japan, the world's largest LNG importers, have similarities that require importing LNG due to scare resource and geopolitical limitations. Though developed similarly, the energy policies appear to be quite different. The changes in the energy policies become more pronounced after the Shale Revolution in the United States and the Fukushima nuclear accident. Asian Premium is extra charge being collected by OPEC countries from Asian countries when selling oil in comparison to western countries. This places a heavy burden on Asian energy-poor countries like Korea and Japan. This paper was written as a question of why Korea and Japan are implementing different policies as countries in Northeast Asia with similar energy security structures, what causes them, and what is influencing them. To this end, the analysis focused on the expanded multiple stream framework, the IEA of the International Energy Agency, and the white papers and statistics of Korea and Japan. The research question that will be addressed is why there are different energy policies in Korea and Japan despite the commonalities in terms of energy security and geographical location. For analysis, the model applied to the study is basically based on Kingdon's policy stream model and Zahariadis' modified multiple stream model. The paper looks at the stream of timely issues in Japan and Korea, the stream of politics, and the stream of policy alternatives after 2011 in order to analyze how and why the agenda setting and decision-making were made. Here, the extended multiple stream model of Herweg(2015) was used. This will be used to examine the changes in Korea’s and Japan’s energy policy, it’s implementation and political factors that influenced it, and this is to identify the factors that influenced the failure of policy changes by separating the agenda setting and decision-making stages.