The United States and Japan have a long history of cooperation related to the environment that includes extensive collaborations across the public and private sectors at the global, national, and sub-national levels. A key feature of many collaborations has been the three-way benefits they provide. In finance and environmental circles, these are sometimes called triple-bottom-line investments supporting people, planet, and profit (Khan, Ahmad, and Majava 2021). In Japan, scholars, officials, and activists are increasingly using an old concept, 三方よし (sanpo yoshi), which can be literally translated as three-way-good, to describe these kinds of projects (Ohno and Uesu 2022).

Since sanpo yoshi investments are beneficial for a company’s bottom line as well as its longevity (Yamaoka and Oe 2021), multinational corporations have often been key supporters. For example, in 2015 Toyota announced its Environmental Challenge 2050, which aspired not just to a “net zero” (carbon emissions) operation but also achieve a “net positive impact” that would produce positive social benefits in addition to its business and environmental ones (Toyota Corporation 2018, 7). Since Toyota has been the largest global automaker nearly every year for the past twenty years, the company’s success offers compelling evidence that pro-climate policies can also be exceptionally profitable (Simão and Lisboa 2017; Haddad 2021, 142-5).

In addition to greening its automobiles, Toyota has been actively working towards these goals in its North American manufacturing facilities and dealerships, increasing their energy efficiency and reducing their carbon emissions (e.g., Toyota North America’s scope 1 and 2 emissions were 14% lower in 2024 than in 2019) (Toyota North America 2025). To take just one local example, Toyota’s new EV battery plant in North Carolina is scheduled to open in 2025, and in addition to the jobs and economic gains expected from the plant, Toyota has engaged with numerous collaborators to ensure that the new plant contributes to the company’s “net positive” goals. Since 2021 it has partnered with the Pollinator Partnership, a California-based NGO focuses on increasing pollinator habitat, to enhance more than fifteen thousand acres of habitat in North America, including two sites in North Carolina near its new EV factory (Pollinator Partnership 2025). It is also working with students at a local technical state university to design and build an environmental education forest in a 300-acre woodland adjacent to the site that will host the new manufacturing facility (Norman 2024).

To provide another example, FexEx has been operating in Japan since 1984, establishing its North Pacific Regional Hub at Kansai International Airport near Osaka in 2014 (FedEx 2016). In November 2021, it announced its plan to achieve carbon neutrality by 2040, which included a commitment to a fully zero-emission electric vehicle fleet for parcel delivery, sustainable packaging, sustainable aircraft fuels, increased fuel conservation, and use of renewable energy and energy efficiency management programs at all of its facilities worldwide (FedEx 2021). It first introduced an EV charging station as well as zero-emission delivery trucks to its Japan-based fleet in 2016 (Parcel 2016).

FedEx is also partnering with local NGOs to support its environmental activities in Japan. In December 2024, as part of a broader effort to reduce plastic waste in the ocean, more than 90 FedEx volunteers worked with a local nonprofit, Hands On Tokyo, to collect 28 kg of waste along the Arakawa riverbank in Tokyo before it flowed into the ocean (FedEx 2024). The company is also working with Mirai no Mori to support a variety of environmental education and forest conservation activities for disadvantaged Japanese youth (Mori 2024).

American and Japanese financial institutions are facilitating the global growth of green finance. Although sustainability may be in line a company’s community values, an important reason why private money is flowing towards sustainable investments is because they tend to have lower risk while also offering a good return (UNCTAD 2023, 125; Bodhanwala and Bodhanwala 2020). To put this private investment in perspective, the $6 trillion in sustainable finance that has already being invested in private markets (UNCTAD 2023, xii) is more than twenty times the aspirational goal of $300 billion set by global governments in 2024 at COP 29 in Baku (United Nations 2024).

As in the corporate sphere, many of the U.S.-Japan national government collaborations have focused on sanpo yoshi initiatives focused on generating economic and social benefits as well as environmental ones. Unlike trade and security issues, where political priorities can shift dramatically after elections, U.S.-Japan environmental cooperation has proven resilient, with new initiatives forming under both Republican and Democratic administrations in the U.S. as well as during different Prime Ministers in Japan. In recent decades, these collaborations have tended to focus especially on clean energy and green-tech development, and they usually involve elaborate public-private partnerships that engage the private sector.

A few of the most recent binational initiatives include: the U.S.- Japan Climate Partnership (2022), U.S.- Japan Electric Battery and Critical Mineral Supply Chain Agreement (2023), U.S.-Japan Memorandum of Commitment on Geothermal (2023), and the U.S-Japan Partnership to Accelerate Nuclear Fusion (2024). Although these are national government initiatives, they are generally carried out by individual corporations working in specific locations. The national-level agreement to promote EV battery development is partly realized in Toyota’s $14 million investment in Liberty, North Carolina mentioned earlier (Economic Development Partnership of North Carolina 2023). The U.S.-Japan Climate Partnership is expressed in Google’s $690 million investment in clean energy infrastructure in Japan, which is building solar panels Inzai City, Chiba, where Google has one of its main data centers (Google 2024). Relatedly, the initiatives inspire U.S.-Japan corporate-university partnerships, and those benefit the students, faculty, and researchers connected to particular schools (e.g., University of Tennessee, Carnegie Mellon University, Micron’s U.S.-Japan University Network).

Increasingly, subnational U.S. and Japanese governments—states, prefectures, cities, and towns in both countries—are fostering collaborations using the sanpo yoshi principles, encouraging local leaders, companies, schools, and residents to work with collaborators in the other country to bring economic, social, and environmental benefits to their communities. One recent trend has been for local governments to draft Memorandums of Understanding (MOUs), spelling out the areas that they plan to work together.[1] These MOUs have the benefit of specifying the roles and expectations of both sides and also ensuring that the whole local government, not just the impassioned individual who dreamed up the idea, is involved in their execution.

One good example is the evolving partnership between Lancaster, CA in the United States and the town of Namie in Japan. In 2011 Namie was devastated by the Triple Disaster in nearby Fukushima, and it decided to focus on the development of hydrogen power for the Tokyo 2020 Olympics to foster local economic development. Anticipating the high clean energy needs for the 2028 Olympics in Los Angelos, Lancaster sought to leverage Namie’s experience to develop its own green hydrogen infrastructure. In 2021, facilitated by the local Consul General for Japan, Mayor Rex Parris welcomed Namie Mayor Kazuhiro Yoshida to Lancaster to sign a “Smart Sister City” MOU to promote joint efforts to utilize hydrogen (Consulate-General of Japan in Los Angeles 2021).

In addition to the two mayors and their local governments, the Namie-Lancaster collaboration includes many, many corporate partners including: Heliogen (a California renewable energy company), Hitachi Zozen Inova (a Swiss-Japanese waste-to-energy company that will build the anerobic digestion plant used to convert organic material to hydrogen gas), Iwatani (a Japanese energy company that will be responsible for distributing the hydrogen), to name a few. The Namie-Lancaster relationship is growing through the H2 Twin Cities program, which connects “mentor” cities that have experience with hydrogen energy (Namie and Lancaster) with “mentee” cities (County of Hawai’i) and “sibling” cities (Aberdeen, UK and Kobe, Japan). In this way, the local projects in Namie and Lancaster are serving to expand the U.S.-Japan collaboration to cities and even countries.

Although both national governments in Japan and the United States have undergone changes in their administrations in the last six months, their environmental cooperation is likely to continue because their activities are creating benefits for all parties. It may be that some of the binational initiatives will be re-branded—the U.S.- Japan Climate Partnership could become the U.S.-Japan Innovative Energy Partnership (or something similar)—but is likely that their substance will remain the same.

Multinational corporations will continue to engage in conservation efforts and expand their use of the renewable energy, both of which saves them money while lowering the climate-related risks to their global operations. U.S. and Japanese national governments will likely keep promoting collaborative efforts that promote the economic, social, and environmental wellbeing of their citizens. Local governments in both will probably continue to find innovative ways to work together to benefit their residents. By working together and focusing on sanpo yoshi initiatives, Americans and Japanese can create win-win outcomes that improve the economic performance of their companies, the living standards of their people, and the health of the planet.