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Japan Strives to Keep Importing Iranian Oil Despite US Sanctions

Japan’s energy policy towards Iran has been an area of struggle for independence from the United States for four decades.
Even when Japan tried to pursue its own energy policy towards Iran, the US has generally had the final say. From Japan’s point of view, however, the US stance towards Japan-Iran energy relations has toughened gradually since the 1979 revolution.
In the early eighties, for example, Washington was not completely against Tokyo’s close relations with Tehran. At the end of 1980, even while Iran held US diplomats hostage, Japan kept importing Iranian oil. Japan continued these imports, as did some European nations, disregarding US warnings that the oil revenue would help Tehran’s war effort against Baghdad during the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq War. (According to the memoir of Shigeo Muraoka, a retired Japanese trade official, then UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher declined President-elect Ronald Reagan’s request to persuade oil companies to stop buying oil from Iran, saying “it is beyond my reach.”)