In December 2002, the Japanese government decided upon "Biomass Nippon Strategy" at the cabinet meeting. This is the first national strategy for Japan to utilize biomass as valuable resource, and a comprehensive one including the viewpoints of technology, social system and economy. In this strategy, four reasons are professed including a necessity to create "Recycling-Oriented Society". And the strategy sets three types of goals, i.e. technical, regional and national with specific action plans for production, collection and transportation, conversion technologies, and stimulation of demand for energy use or material use. The implementation of the strategy is just getting started and there remain a lot of challenges to be tackled including the high cost of using biomass or demand stimulation of biomass products. But the utilization of biomass will continue to be an important policy issues in Japan. (c) 2005 Published by Elsevier Ltd.