Japan Just Posted the Largest Crude Oil Drawdown in Its History

The number

Since March, Japan's crude oil stocks have fallen by tens of millions of barrels. Analysts at Hedgeye put the draw at roughly 70 to 100 million barrels, which would be the steepest decline in the country's recorded history. Even taking the conservative end of that range, it is a faster drain than Japan ran during the 1970s oil shocks or the 2011 Fukushima energy crunch.

The figure lines up with what the Japanese government has done in the open. Tokyo began its largest-ever release from strategic reserves on March 16, then prepared a second tranche of about 20 days of supply starting in May. You do not authorize back-to-back emergency releases on that scale unless the commercial barrels behind them are leaving quickly.

Why Japan, of all the importers

Every major Asian economy leans on the Strait of Hormuz, but Japan is the most exposed of the large buyers. About 90 percent of its crude imports transit the strait, against a global average closer to 20 percent. In fiscal 2024 Japan imported 136.3 million kilolitres of crude, and Middle Eastern producers supplied 95.9 percent of it. By 2025 that Middle East dependence sat near 94 percent, concentrated in Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Kuwait, and Qatar.

Put differently: Japan is the fourth-largest destination for crude moving through Hormuz, taking about 10.9 percent of the flow, behind China at 37.7 percent, India at 14.7 percent, and South Korea at 12.0 percent. When the chokepoint narrows, China and India have pipelines, land borders, and discounted Russian barrels to fall back on. Japan has tankers and a reserve.

The reserve math

Japan holds one of the three largest strategic oil stockpiles in the world, roughly 470 million barrels between government and mandated private reserves. As of May 9, that buffer was equivalent to about 205 days of domestic consumption: 121 days in the national reserve, 84 days in privately held reserves, and one day in a joint storage program. That is a deep cushion by any standard, which is the point. Japan built it precisely because nearly all of its oil rides through a single strait it does not control.

By mid-May, Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi said Japan had secured enough crude to cover June and would hold off on any additional reserve release. That is the signal worth tracking: not the headline draw, but whether the government keeps pausing releases as supply normalizes, or goes back to the well.

The workarounds are real, and thin

Japan is doing what an import-dependent economy does in a squeeze. It agreed to buy 1 million barrels of crude from Mexico for July delivery, its first such purchase, and non-Hormuz cargoes began arriving from May. Useful, but small against a country that consumes on the order of 3 million barrels a day. The reserve is still doing most of the bridging, and the wider picture is tightening with it: the IEA expects OECD oil inventories to fall to a record low by the end of 2026.

What to watch

The cleanest read on this is the Petroleum Association of Japan's weekly oil-stocks report, which publishes commercial crude and product inventories every week. Two things tell you whether the drawdown is easing: the week-on-week change in crude stocks, and the days-of-supply coverage ratio. We track the American side of the same story on the SPR page and the full petroleum picture on the oil dashboard, and the reopening logistics in our Strait of Hormuz piece.

The same forces draining the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve are draining Japan's, only Japan started with far more exposure to the chokepoint that set the whole thing off. The barrels in storage are the scoreboard. The weekly print is where it updates.