TOKYO — Responding to criticism that lax oversight played a role in the Fukushima nuclear accident, Japan’s government may make its nuclear regulatory agency more independent as early as next year.

The country’s minister of trade and industry, Banri Kaieda, speaking in Vienna on Monday, said that the government wanted to separate the regulatory agency from his ministry, which is in charge of promoting Japan’s nuclear industry. Cozy ties between government and industry are now widely blamed for allowing the Fukushima Daiichi plant to operate despite inadequate protections against large tsunamis and insufficient backup power systems. Those vulnerabilities proved disastrous after the devastating earthquake on March 11.

Mr. Kaieda made the vague pledge of reform during a meeting of the International Atomic Energy Agency, the United Nations nuclear watchdog. At the meeting, the head of the agency Yukiya Amano, said that nuclear regulators must be “genuinely independent,” echoing a criticism that his agency has repeatedly made of Japan’s nuclear oversight in the past.

There has also been widespread criticism in Japan that the regulators’ lack of independence contributed to clumsy response during the first days of the nuclear crisis. The government largely left the response up to the plant’s operator, Tokyo Electric Power Company, during a period the company now acknowledges that nuclear fuel was melting down in three of the plant’s reactors. Officials in the prime minister’s office have since complained that they were getting inadequate information from not only Tokyo Electric, but also from Mr. Kaieda’s ministry and regulators.