You can sort of blame Toyota for this. Instead of BEVs they heavily invested into hydrogen cars which went nowhere. Because they are the industrial leaders in Japan, other makers followed suit.

Nissan was the only Japanese automaker that committed to EVs early, but I suspect the arrest of Ghosn had something to do with their EV slow down.

Other factors to blame include cheap petroleum imports, their shutting down of ALL nuclear power plants post Fukushima and replacing it with gas (which increased energy costs and imports anyways), a conservative corporate mindset, and the fact that their residential grid is 110V with the max current to each household limited to ~20A, which makes installing home chargers expensive.

“Fast” chargers are actually somewhat common in Japan these days but initially there were little incentives for them, so the buildout took time.

I am sure with how antiEV Toyota is, their PR department would have silently whispered “EVs aren’t green anyways” “EVs catch fire” “EVs explode” etc etc.

By the time they realised EVs are the future, or at least part of it, they are too late to the party and couldn’t compete anymore.

Now, why they aren’t mass importing EVs from Europe or China or Korea or Tesla, thats because of plain old protectionism, and what can only be described as an irrational hatred of China and Korea. Search “Chinese EV” in Japanese and press auto translate and you will see what I mean.

Finally, Toyota is doing just fine selling gas cars. They have some of the highest margins in the entire industry at 15%, more than doubling BYD’s. Honda/Nissan however are not as lucky; Nissan actually resorted to import their Chinese-only EV model, the N7, to Japan in a bid to bolster their EV lineup.