September 15, 2009

Japan's incoming prime minister Yukio Hatoyama has chosen 77-year-old former bureaucrat Hirohisa Fujii as his finance minister, a newspaper reported on Tuesday.Hatoyama, who is set to become premier on Wednesday, made the decision late Monday to nominate Fujii, a senior adviser to his Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ), the Nikkei business daily reported without naming its sources.Fujii has been vocal in attacking the outgoing government's stimulus package, vowing to redirect what his party deems to be wasteful spending.

He has also said that in principle the government should refrain from intervening in the currency market to curb the strength of the yen and protect the country's exporters."I think it's a wrong policy for a nation to just weaken its currency to boost its exports," he told Dow Jones Newswires in an interview on Monday.The current strength of the yen has dealt a heavy blow to the country's exporters, which have also been hammered by the global economic downturn.