It is reported that Mr Naoto Kan Prime Minister of Japan has removed three top officials in charge of Japanese nuclear energy policy, taking aim at the cozy ties between regulators and the power industry that were exposed after the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant accident.
The three officials include Mr Nobuaki Terasaka, the leader of the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency. The agency has been criticized for allowing inadequate safety measures at the Fukushima plant, including insufficient defenses against the tsunami that was unleashed by a deadly earthquake March 11th 2011.
The agency, which is part of the Ministry of Trade and Industry, has also been accused of trying to manipulate public opinion by planting people at recent town hall style meetings to speak in support of nuclear power.
The other two officials are Mr Kazuo Matsunaga, the top bureaucrat at the ministry and Mr Tetsuhiro Hosono, leader of the ministry's energy resources bureau, which promotes the power industry.
The announcement was made nearly five months after the 9.0 magnitude earthquake and the tsunami it unleashed left more than 20,000 dead or missing in northern Japan. The twin disasters also damaged the Fukushima Daiichi plant and led to radiation leaks, the worst since the 1986 nuclear disaster in Chernobyl in Ukraine.
The firing of the three officials is highly unusual in Japan, where elite career bureaucrats taken from top universities have long been the nation's de facto rulers. However, Kan has begun to focus on collusion between the government and the power industry in what many here see as a belated effort to prolong his stay in office.
The embattled prime minister had promised to step down in the face of intense criticism from his own Democratic Party of the government's slow and seemingly haphazard response to the nuclear disaster. But he has since appeared to backtrack, refusing to say when he will leave office.
He appears to be trying to revive his fortunes by deflecting the criticism onto the bureaucracy. He has also tried to tap the public's deep misgivings about nuclear power by calling for reducing reliance on it in favor of solar and other energy sources.
Mr Kan made his harshest remarks yet about government ties to the nuclear industry, saying that "It was exactly the same structure of collusion that I found as health minister during the AIDS blood products problem."
But Mr Kan's continuing lack of popularity, as well as criticism in the local press, suggests that his efforts may be too little, too late. Asahi Shimbun, one of Japan's largest dailies, warned that the removal of the three officials could backfire by causing more confusion and paralysis in the nation' energy policy.
Still, Mr Kan appears intent on moving forward with what is increasingly appearing to be a sweeping overhaul of Japanese nuclear oversight.
