Lex: Dismount Fujii

There's never a good time to lose a finance chief. For Japanese prime minister Yukio Hatoyama, confronting a fiscal year in which his government will raise more new debt than it receives in tax - the worst budgetary position in the post-war period - the timing could hardly be worse. Still, 77-year-old Hirohisa Fujii, replaced by deputy prime minister Naoto Kan late on Wednesday, was determined to embrace the retirement he deferred last September, when asked to lend a greenhorn administration some much-needed experience. Ben McLannahan analyses the change at the top.