Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda's first face-to-face meeting with anti-nuclear protestors received mixed reviews Thursday, with some media saying it only served to highlight an unbridgeable gap.

Noda met Wednesday with about a dozen representatives of the thousands of people who gather in front of his office every week arguing that Japan does not need nuclear power.

The 30-minute meeting, held in a conference room at the prime minister's office and webcast live, saw no agreement between the two sides, with Noda only saying Japan was working on "phasing out dependence on nuclear power in the mid to long term".

Japan's top-selling Yomiuri Shimbun dismissed the sit-down, saying the issue had been extensively discussed in parliament, at news conferences and at public hearings.

The Yomiuri, which has long argued that Japan needs nuclear energy to power the world's third largest economy, said the government and the protesters would never reach a compromise.

Japan's fleet of reactors gradually went offline in the aftermath of the disaster at Fukushima, sparked by the earthquake-tsunami of March 2011, the world's worst nuclear accident since Chernobyl.

But amid dire warnings of the economic effect of possible power shortages as air conditioners are ramped up in the often oppressive summer heat, Noda ordered the restarting of two units in the country's industrial heartland.

A further 48 functioning reactors remain mothballed.

"The prime minister's decision (to restart nuclear reactors) averted a critical power shortage," the Yomiuri said in its editorial. "The government must continue with a realistic energy policy."

Meanwhile, the liberal Asahi Shimbun, which has argued against nuclear power since the Fukushima crisis, said the meeting was a good start towards a more representative democracy.

"The gap between them was not bridged, but (the meeting's) significance cannot be dismissed," the influential daily said in an editorial.

While lamenting the short time allotted for the meeting, the paper praised Noda's decision to face individuals who only loosely represent a protest movement drawn from a wide cross-section of society.

Demonstrators' grievances are not just about use of nuclear power, but also about the way the government makes decisions in a process unfairly weighted in favour of interest groups, the Asahi said.

"This meeting must be seen as the first step towards open politics," it said.