TOKYO – New Environment Minister Yoshiaki Harada is known for his expertise in foreign affairs and trade, reflecting his earlier career at the now-defunct Ministry of International Trade and Industry.

The 74-year-old politician was a Foreign Affairs Committee chairman at the House of Representatives in 2005 and maintained that Japan should take the dispute over China’s exploitation of gas fields in the East China Sea to an international court of arbitration.

Harada assumed the post of senior vice education minister in 2003 but was forced to resign after he admitted in 2004 that he had falsely claimed to be a graduate of Tufts University in the United States.