Summit Notebook
Exclusive outtakes from industry leaders
Hard road on Japan’s nuclear policy
By Kevin Krolicki
Suddenly Taro Kono doesn’t look like quite the lonely maverick in Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party.
Kono, a member of the lower house of parliament, has been an unrelenting critic of Japan’s pursuit of nuclear power since he was first elected in 1996. That made him an odd fit with the LDP, which ruled Japan almost continuously from the mid-1950s to 2009 and put nuclear power at the center of Japan’s energy policy.
“For the past 15 years, it has felt like Taro Kono against the LDP,” he told the Reuters Rebuilding Japan Summit.
But since the Fukushima Daiichi accident triggered by the March 11 earthquake and tsunami, Kono’s call to scrap nuclear in favour of renewable energy and conservation has moved from the fringe to something closer to the mainstream of political opinion.
About 50 lawmakers attended a recent study group he sponsored on energy policy, out of 722, and Kono sees a prospect for a kind of “green alliance” between sympathetic LDP lawmakers and some in the Democratic Party of Japan.
