Poll: Majority want Ozawa resignation

TOKYO, Jan. 17 (UPI) -- A majority of Japan's eligible voters polled called for the resignation of ruling party Secretary General Ichiro Ozawa over a land-purchase scandal.

A Yomiuri Shimbun weekend telephone poll found 70 percent said they want Ozawa, second in command in Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama's Democratic Party of Japan, to leave to take responsibility for the arrests of his current and two former secretaries linked to a land purchase. Only 21 percent said Ozawa should stay.

In the poll, 91 percent of the respondents said Ozawa had not publicly explained the scandal involving his political funds management organization, unchanged from a previous survey, while 88 percent said he should agree to be questioned by the Tokyo public prosecutor's office.

The approval rating for Hatoyama's Cabinet in the poll fell to 45 percent, down 11 percentage points from a survey conducted about a week earlier. The disapproval rating during the same period rose 8 percentage points to 42 percent.

The approval rating for the DPJ dropped to 34 percent from 39 percent, while that of the opposition Liberal Democratic Party rose to 20 percent from 16 percent. The poll said 34 percent said they did not support any party, up 2 percentage points from the previous survey.

The poll is based on responses from 1,146 voters selected randomly by a computer.