Industry minister Banri Kaieda announced Thursday he is firing three senior nuclear officials over the mishandling of the Fukushima nuclear crisis.
The three are Vice Minister Kazuo Matsunaga, the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry's top bureaucrat; Nobuaki Terasaka, head of the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency; and Tetsuhiro Hosono, head of the Natural Resources and Energy Agency. Matsunaga will be replaced by Kenyu Adachi, chief of the ministry's Economic and Industrial Policy Bureau, METI said.
"I have been thinking about the need to reshuffle personnel for about a month," Kaieda told a hastily called news conference. "I would like the new people to build a new Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry."