

I’m Calvin Sims of The Times. I spent 10 years as a foreign correspondent for the paper.

This week I speak with Martin Fackler, Times Tokyo correspondent who explains how Japan became the most energy efficient country in the developed world and why Japan is better prepared than the United States to prosper in this era of rising energy prices.

First some background from recent New York Times articles.

Japanese homes use less than half the energy, on average, than American homes. That is because Japan is seemingly obsessed with saving energy and is far more willing to embrace new technologies than America. Devices like low-energy washing machines and televisions, high-mileage cars and hybrid vehicles abound in Japan as do renewable energies like solar power and home fuel cells. In everyday life, the Japanese are perhaps the most frugal energy consumers. It is common for Japanese families to take turns bathing in the same bathwater. The average household in Japan used 4,177 kilowatt hours of electricity in 2001, the most recent figure, compared with the average American household which consumed 10,655 kilowatt hours.

Well Martin, why is Japan so much more energy efficient than the United States? After all, both countries are rich and have access to technology. But Japan seems to do a much better job. Why is that?

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MARTIN FACKLER. Well I think that there’s no single reason. Rather, it’s a whole range of reasons extending from government policies all the way down to the most mundane daily habits. And if I were to cite one reason, kind of one overarching reason, it’s there really is a different mindset that the Japanese have toward energy. There’s almost a culture of conservation here in Japan, where people really do view energy as a precious resource in a daily sort of way. And it reflects the decisions they make every day. And that’s probably the biggest difference with the United States.

CALVIN SIMS. Is part of it, too, the fact that Japan is a resource-poor country and imports most of its energy? And so I would imagine that, from a policy standpoint, the Japanese may be a little bit timid because they are so dependent on getting their energy from other places, as opposed to the U.S.

MARTIN FACKLER. Yes. Absolutely right. Japan is very aware of the fact that it imports almost all of its energy. And I think something like 70 or 80 percent of Japan’s energy comes from the Middle East alone, which of course is a very politically volatile region. So the Japanese are very keenly aware of just how dependent they are on the Middle East and on imported energy. And so that’s been one of the big pushes behind this conservation mindset. If you look back on the 1970s, Japan had this sort of a wake-up call during the first oil shock around 1971 or ’72 I believe. And the impact was felt in the United States, as well. But I think in Japan people really had a much bigger impact and people still remember it today, 30 some odd years later, as having been this traumatic event when Japan all of a sudden was confronted with just how vulnerable it was to somebody turning off the tap on its imported oil.

CALVIN SIMS. The Japanese government, Martin, also plays a big role in energy conservation. There are lots of tax incentives for developing new technologies and even some subsidies for consumers who employ energy-efficient devices. Right?

MARTIN FACKLER. That’s correct. One of the things that came out of the oil shock of the early 1970’s was a policy whereby prices of gasoline, prices of electricity for home use, kind of daily sorts of energy that we use every day in our lives — the prices of these were raised to sometimes more than two times the world market rate. And so gasoline here in Japan has been much more expensive than the U.S. for many, many years. Even today, if I were to go outside and buy a gallon of gas, it’d cost me somewhere around $5.25, $5.50. And the reason for that is by making the prices artificially high, the government is trying to force everyone to conserve, force everyone to use less energy. And the remarkable thing is just how successful that’s been. Japan has been enormously competitive economically. Toyota, Honda, Nissan — all these companies; it’s a whole range of companies that’s been enormously competitive despite the fact that energy is so expensive here. And so it has, over the past 30, 35 years, created this mindset and this kind of the expectation that energy is expensive and both individuals — you know, households and also companies — all behave in a different way as a result.

CALVIN SIMS. So as we enter this new sort of era where global energy costs are rising very rapidly, Japan is far better suited than the U.S. and many other Western countries to compete. Is that right?

MARTIN FACKLER. It’s definitely better suited than the U.S. Some of the European countries are much closer to Japan. But the U.S., if you look at the numbers, is far and away less efficient than Japan. If you look at average household electricity use, the average Japanese family uses less than half the amount of electricity that the average American family uses in a given year. And the same is true of oil use; the same is true in a number of measures — that Japan really already basically is able to maintain a first world, developed nation living standard with half or less the amount of energy as the United States.

CALVIN SIMS. In a recent article, Martin, you described some of the measures that Japanese people take to conserve energy. And for many Americans some of these measures are a little bit extreme. Tell me a little bit about some of the things they do that Americans are probably unaccustomed to doing.

MARTIN FACKLER. Well, of course there are lots of things about Japan that are just different from the U.S. that would be, I think, hard for Americans to replicate. One of them is the smaller homes here. Home sizes are half the size of Japan. But some of the things that they do are quite efficient. For example, in the wintertime, the entire family gather in a single room to watch television or to eat or whatever. And the reason they do this is so they can just heat that single room. Other things they would do would include kind of very simple things like the entire family will use the same bathwater at night when they take a bath.

CALVIN SIMS. The same bathwater, meaning everybody bathes in the same tub?

MARTIN FACKLER. That’s right. You know, Americans like to take showers in the morning. And in Japan the practice is to take a bath at night. And what they do is they’ll soap off before they get in the bathtub. They’ll take kind of a quick shower, clean themselves off with soap and shampoo. Then they will all use the same bathwater. Not at the same time, of course, but they’ll take turns taking a bath in the same warm bathwater. And that’s one way to save quite a lot of energy because of course it takes a lot of energy to heat, you know, the hundred liters or so that fits into a bathtub.

Calvin Sims

CALVIN SIMS. Wow. And you mentioned even one family, the Kimura family, that then even takes the same bathwater that each family member has sort of soaked in and uses that water to actually wash clothes.

MARTIN FACKLER. That’s right. That’s a common practice here. What you see is a rubber tube basically going from the bathtub to the clothes-washing machine. And when everyone is finished with their baths, you’ll still have 100, 150 liters of warm water sitting in the bathtub. And the Kimura family told me that that was enough to wash two or even three loads of laundry. If you needed to wash colors, whatever, in warm water, they just use the bathwater instead of heating yet another bunch of water just to wash the clothes.

CALVIN SIMS. So, Martin, do you think Americans would be willing to adopt some of these measures that the Japanese are taking?

MARTIN FACKLER. That’s a hard question. You know, I think now it might be hard because even with gas prices up, energy is still pretty cheap in the United States. And I think it would probably take a pretty substantial rise in energy prices for Americans to do some of these things. You know, of course, some of the things in Japan like smaller homes will probably be harder to replicate. But some of these things, whether it be something like biking to the grocery store to go shopping or taking public transportation or even forgoing your central heating and using a space heater to heat a single room in the wintertime — these are things Americans definitely could do. But I think the reason why you don’t see that now is that Americans still take energy for granted. They still assume that energy is a cheap and plentiful resource. And if I can put my finger on anything that’s the biggest difference between Japan and the United States on this issue, I would say it’s that mindset — that folks in Japan, by and large, do not take energy for granted; they do not see it as such a cheap and limitless resource. And their daily spending practices and daily — the daily lifestyle — reflects the fact that they are consciously trying to save energy and see it as something that they do need to conserve and to treat as a precious resource.

CALVIN SIMS. Is part of that mindset driven out of care for the environment?

MARTIN FACKLER. I don’t think so. I think it’s mainly the cost of energy because of the government policies. I just think energy is so much more expensive in Japan that most folks feel compelled to save on energy because it saves on money. Energy is so expensive here that small, incremental savings such as sharing bathwater or taking the bicycle to the supermarket really add up in your budget — in your household budget because energy is so expensive.

CALVIN SIMS. One device that has gained a lot of attention in Japan is the fuel cell. Tell me a little bit about that. How does it work and how much does it actually save?

MARTIN FACKLER. Well there’s many types of fuel cells. Some of the earliest ones were developed in the United States and the United States still leads in a lot of these technologies. The American ones were developed for the space program. Japan is very good at commercializing these sorts of technologies. And at bringing down the cost and making them available to consumers in useful products. And you see it in cars with Toyota, Honda, Nissan leading now in terms of fuel-cell vehicles. But the type of fuel cell that I mentioned in my story, which is really interesting here, and in which Japan is the only country in the world currently to have these on the market, is home fuel cells. And if you can imagine like a home with a kind of a cabinet-size silent device outside. And that device will generate the electricity for the home. And it’s in essence turning every home into its own power plant. That’s the idea behind the home fuel cell. And just as background, a fuel cell takes hydrogen, adds oxygen to it to create water, and from that process electricity is produced. And it’s a way of generating electricity without a lot of — well, for one, without a lot of pollution in the home or in the car. And so the idea here in Japan is to turn every household into a power plant, giving it a self-sustaining electrical power source. And these things are just starting here. They’re still heavily subsidized by the government. But they will produce half or more of the electrical power needs of a household without that household having to take that power from the power grid.

CALVIN SIMS. So these home fuel-cell devices can cut your electricity bill in half then, basically.

MARTIN FACKLER. That’s right. Because essentially you’re generating your own power. The way it works is you need a source of hydrogen. The Japanese are using methane, or in other words, natural gas, which comes in through the natural gas utility piped into the house like you’d use it to cook with on a stove or something. And it just uses a lot less natural gas then to produce the electricity than you would use the electricity itself from the electrical grid. And it’s seen as a way, a new technology, for again ultimately decreasing Japan’s dependence upon Middle Eastern oil and upon imported energy.

CALVIN SIMS. How much does one of these devices cost?

MARTIN FACKLER. Well, it costs a family something like $9,000. And the idea is that over several years’ time you’ll save that much energy. The actual cost is probably closer to $50,000, $60,000 and that difference of about $40,000 is subsidized by the government. But the high cost comes because it’s a very new technology and the idea is that in a couple years’ time to bring it down to where the production cost is actually the same cost that a family would pay, in other words $9,000 or $10,000.

CALVIN SIMS. It’s clean. It’s efficient. It seems to be fairly compact. Why don’t we have these devices in the United States?

MARTIN FACKLER. I don’t know. That’s a good question. I think one thing is that Americans might not be quite so willing to live with something like that in their basements or their yards. There seems to be, I think, much more apprehension in the United States to having something like a hydrogen-powered generator sitting in your yard than in Japan. I think Japan is much more comfortable — the Japanese are much more comfortable with new technology and with the idea of having devices like this sitting near their homes.

CALVIN SIMS. Martin, what is the lesson, if there is any, that the United States can learn from Japan’s energy efficiency, do you think?

MARTIN FACKLER. Well, I think the main one is that there’s no single answer to becoming more efficient like Japan. You know, there’s no golden bullet to the energy problem. Rather, the one thing that Japan does seem to have that is under all of their energy measures, is just an attitude or a mindset that energy is a precious resource and something that the government, companies and individuals consciously need to try to think of ways to conserve. And I think that’s the biggest thing. It’s this mindset of conservation which I see here. It exists in the United States, too, but I think is much less common. But besides that, I don’t think there’s any single answer, any single easy to replicate, you know, solution to the problem.

CALVIN SIMS. Martin Fackler, New York Times Tokyo correspondent, thanks very much for speaking with us.

MARTIN FACKLER. Thank you, Calvin.

CALVIN SIMS. And thanks for listening. I’m Calvin Sims of The New York Times. We’ll be back next week with another edition of World View.

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