Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi needs to place a bit more emphasis on growth-oriented economic policy if he wants to maximize the effect of his structural reform measures, British economic journalists said at a recent symposium in Tokyo.

"I'm very troubled by the kind of language used by the Koizumi administration like the 'no pain, no gain' approach to restructuring," said Krishna Guha, a columnist at The Financial Times. "That's fair enough, but we should not make this a moral issue."

Guha and other journalists spent a week in Japan earlier this month at the invitation of the Keizai Koho Center, a public-relations arm of the Japan Federation of Economic Organizations (Keidanren).