No sauce user no-one is writing on that shit, (only piece by piece) take it for the rambling of a madman on the internet it's fine by me.
Japan eats most of the LNG, it's well over 33% I believe since fukhushima…
Essentially all the LNG Russia produce is to sells to Japan from the Sakhalin fields, but since that's a direct long term contract (contracts for energy in bulk are typically for 25 years) they're selling at a subpar price since those were signed long before Japan ceased nuclear activity (and drove the prices for LNG sky high by essentially buying everything available. Even in the low current price for energy, Japan still buy LNG at 4x time the price of natural gas).
And that's it, Russia doesn't do LNG, they do pipelines (waaaaaaayyyy cheaper), that's their only active facility AFAIK (made by Shell and which the infrastructure is roughly 50% Russian owned and 50% Japanese, hence the low contract prices, Japan literally paid for it).
Meanwhile Japan has 28 LNG terminals…
Most of the production is the arabs (UAE, Qatar, Algeria, thought most of that one goes into Europe since it's really close), then should have been US shale gas in which Japan has invested massively (just look over the details of Japanese investment in North America since 2011), but are frozen in limbo due to the current low prices.
In the meantime Russia has prioritized expanding it's network east, which include a junction on the network on Sakhalin that was originally only made to export gas to from the offshore fields of Sakhalin to the LNG terminal (then shipped to Japan).
So yeah the real politik decision here for Japan to take is celebrate a peace treaty for something that happened 3 generations ago, give Russia the 4 rocks they ask for and nobody in Japan cares about (except the US, open a sea map, realize that's the Kuriles are the only safe place Russian ships and more importantly subs can get out from their ports to the pacific without running into US listening posts) and get their gas way cheaper than it is, which given the state of Japan economy would be more than a god bless…