A right-wing gunman held a senior Tokyo stock exchange official hostage in his office for six hours yesterday because he wanted to stop Japan's "Big Bang" deregulation of its financial markets, police said.
The siege ended when the gunman voluntarily surrendered and released his hostage unharmed shortly after police gave him cigarettes and a cup of tea.
A police spokesman said the middle-aged man, who had demanded to see the Finance Minister, Mr Hiroshi Mitsuzuka, was a disciple of a right-wing leader who committed suicide in a Japanese newspaper office in 1993.
Police said the man was intimidated at the prospect of the Big Bang deregulation reforms scheduled for April, which mean a dramatic opening up of Japan's financial markets to foreign institutions.
The gunman took the official, a Finance Ministry bureaucrat on secondment to the exchange, hostage on the building's 14th floor, briefly setting off panic among traders on one of the world's largest exchanges.
Police identified the hostage as Mr Masahiro Abe (50), the exchange's deputy comptroller. The hostage taker was named as Mr Tetsuo Itagaki (41), a follower of Shusuke Nomura, who in October 1993 committed suicide by shooting himself twice in the stomach in the offices of the Asahi newspaper group.
Nomura, head of the Kaze no Kai (Wind Party), took his life because a cartoon in a magazine owned by Asahi had ridiculed his Japanese nationalist views.
Police said the man, dressed in a business suit, appeared at the floor's reception area, produced his name card and demanded to see Mr Abe.