Tokyo Governor Yuriko Koike used a stop in Astana on Monday to urge capital cities across Eurasia to pool procurement and share best practice on green hydrogen, in the latest sign that her administration is leaning on city-to-city diplomacy to push Tokyo’s 2050 net-zero target. The governor, speaking at the Astana International Forum, said start-ups, small businesses and municipal authorities could move on the technology faster than national governments and called on capitals to assemble “a standing exchange.”
Koike has cast Tokyo’s 2050 net-zero pathway around two pivots: halving citywide emissions by 2030, and rebuilding the metropolis’s industrial fringe around hydrogen-fuelled logistics, heating and power. Roughly 4 percent of Tokyo’s primary energy supply is now hydrogen-related, up from less than 1 percent in 2018, and the metropolitan government has committed ¥1.6 trillion to hydrogen infrastructure across the current ten-year plan.
The Astana visit included separate meetings with the mayors of Rotterdam and Amsterdam, the two European capitals furthest along on harbour-anchored hydrogen plans. The governor said she had agreed in principle to a Tokyo-Rotterdam-Amsterdam working group on port hydrogen handling, and signed a memorandum with the Astana municipality on city-resilience cooperation.
Koike also met Kazakh President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev for what officials described as “thorough” talks on Japan-Kazakhstan cooperation, including on critical minerals — Kazakhstan is one of the world’s largest uranium producers — and on bilateral chemical industry investment. Tokyo metropolitan government data shows roughly 90 Tokyo-headquartered firms operating in Kazakhstan, mostly in trading and resources.
Domestically, the trip is part of a continuing effort by the governor to position Tokyo as a quasi-independent diplomatic actor inside the wider Japanese state. She has used the city’s emissions targets and its 2024 “∞” (infinity) civic branding to push outwards, sometimes ahead of the central government. Officials in the Prime Minister’s office, who briefed reporters anonymously after the trip, said the visit had been coordinated but that the centre would “continue to set foreign policy.”
Inside Tokyo politics, Koike’s third term has hinged on infrastructure delivery as much as on diplomacy. A new hydrogen-fuelling network around Tokyo Bay went online in March; a hydrogen-bus rollout across the central wards has missed its mid-term target by roughly six months. The governor told reporters she would “reset” the bus timeline by July.
Tokyo Metropolitan Assembly elections are scheduled for July 2027, and Koike’s Tomin First party currently holds the largest single bloc with 56 seats. Her allies say the Eurasian trip is part of a broader effort to extend her national and international profile ahead of that vote; opponents say it underlines a tendency to favour overseas optics over harder-edged municipal questions like aging social-care infrastructure.