The Japanese are incredibly stubborn for these things

They’re not stubborn, they don’t have a choice. The Japanese electrical grid is antiquated and stressed to the breaking point. A massive consumer migration to EVs would cause total collapse.

There aren’t any easy solutions either. The Fukushima nuclear disaster has made the situation even worse, both by reducing the amount of generation capacity and by constraining policy (new nuclear plants are politically untenable now).

Renewables seem like the obvious answer, but the grid infrastructure isn’t good there. There’s No storage capacity, nor is there any geographic redundancy. Japan is a country of 122 million people crammed into a few small islands. When the sun stops shining, it stops shining for the whole country. When the wind doesn’t blow, it doesn’t blow for the whole country. This means if they become dependent on a lot of renewables they become susceptible to multiple-day blackouts, with potentially severe consequences in the winter.