Haruhiko Kuroda hit the ground running when he was appointed by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in March to take charge of the Bank of Japan.

Out of the blue, the central bank's new governor unveiled a super-aggressive easing policy the next month to double the nation's monetary base in just two years. He said the BOJ would buy more than ¥7 trillion in long-term Japanese government bonds per month to flood the financial system with money to end more than a decade of deflation.

The BOJ's nine-member Policy Board unanimously supported Kuroda's goal of stoking 2 percent inflation in two years — a surprise about-face from its stance under his predecessor, Masaaki Shirakawa, who was concerned about the potential side effects of embracing such radical quantitative easing.