Japan has a new central bank governor for the first time in 10 years.

On Sunday, 71-year-old economics professor Ueda Kazuo succeeded Kuroda Haruhiko, whose term ended on Saturday.

The bank's governor and deputy governors all serve five-year terms.

Ueda, who is also a former BOJ policy-board member, became the first governor in the post-war era to come from academia.

In earlier testimony at the Diet, Ueda expressed his intention to continue the BOJ's monetary easing policy to support Japan's economy, and encourage wage hikes to achieve a price stability target of 2 percent inflation.
In last month's national annual wage negotiations, many large Japanese companies offered their labor unions wage increases amid record-high inflation.

Ueda and other new BOJ leaders will be watching to see how sustainable such higher wages will be, and whether the increases will eventually spread to small and medium-sized companies, which account for 70 percent of the country's workforce.

Others are voicing concerns over how the nation will cope with a now-weakened market caused by the BOJ's ultra-loose monetary policy.

There are fears of confusion in financial markets if the central bank decides to change course from easing to tightening.

Ueda is faced with daunting tasks from day one.

Investors are watching closely to see how he will handle these side-effects spawned by a decade of extraordinary monetary easing, and at what point Ueda might decide to make revisions to the previous policy.