More than a thousand people protested outside the Japanese prime minister's residence in Tokyo on Friday calling for an end to nuclear power after last year's Fukushima atomic crisis. The rally, which has become a weekly event in recent months, came two days after Premier Yoshihiko Noda met for the first time face-to-face with anti-nuclear demonstrators.
About a dozen representatives of the movement had asked Noda to reverse his decision to restart two reactors and urged him to abandon nuclear power altogether. Noda declined their demand to switch off two reactors that were restarted this summer amid looming power shortages, and repeated his government's plans to adopt a new energy policy to reduce the country's dependence on atomic power, which once accounted for one-third of its supply.