Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami criticised his country's pursuit of nuclear power in an acceptance speech for Spain's 2011 International Catalunya Prize, a news report said Friday.

Murakami said that Japan's people, having suffered the world's only atomic bomb attacks at Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, should have rejected nuclear power in the post-war era, the Kyodo News agency reported.

The author made the comments at a ceremony in Barcelona three months after the March 11 quake and tsunami disaster sparked the world's worst nuclear accident since Chernobyl at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant.

"The accident at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant is the second major nuclear detriment that the Japanese people have experienced," he was quoted as saying, speaking in Japanese, by Kyodo.

"However, this time it was not a bomb being dropped upon us, but a mistake committed by our very own hands."