Our guest speaker for February was Tetsuro Fukushima, Chairman of the House of Councillors Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, former Deputy Chief Cabinet Secretary under Prime Minister Naoto Kan, and Senior Vice-Minister for Foreign Affairs under Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama. Past responsibilities include Secretary- General of the DPJ's Global Warming Countermeasures Headquarters, Chairman of the DPJ's House of Councillors Policy Research Committee and Chairman of the Environment Committees of the House of Councillors and DPJ. He is undoubtedly one of the most dynamic politicians in Japan in the field of energy and the environment.
Mr Fukuyama has agreed to talk about Japan's energy policy after Fukushima: With Japan's first post-Fukushima Basic Energy Plan to be announced in Spring, the role of nuclear energy still in question, a feed-in tariff for renewables starting in July, and other major reforms of energy policy in the pipeline – from unbundling of generation and distribution to public management of TEPCO and opening of grids to independent producers, many basic elements of Japan's energy policy are in flux as never before.
