TOKYO: The approval rates for Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's cabinet have fallen in recent media polls, apparently due to a scandal over state-funded annual cherry blossom-viewing parties.

Abe is accused of, among other things, using taxpayer money for his own interest by inviting many of his supporters to the prime minister-hosted parties.

In Sunday's gubernatorial election in Kochi Prefecture, western Japan, a candidate supported by the ruling Liberal Democratic Party and its coalition partner, Komeito, beat an opposition-backed contender by a vote of some 173,000 to 111,000.

But it seems difficult for the Abe administration to draw the curtain on the scandal at an early date.

In many of the media polls conducted in mid-November or later, when the administration had been grilled by the opposition side over the scandal at the Diet, the country's parliament, the cabinet support rates ranged from around 45 percent to 50 percent, down by up to 7 percentage points from the previous figures.

While the latest readings exceeded the disapproval rates by about 10 points, the sizes of declines in the approval rates were larger than those seen after two scandal-hit ministers in the Abe cabinet resigned in October.

The larger drops in the support rates apparently reflected people's dissatisfaction at Abe over the cherry blossom party scandal, pundits said.

"The cabinet has to reflect on itself in a forthright manner," LDP Secretary-General Toshihiro Nikai told a press conference on Monday.

"The cherry blossom parties are to blame," an LDP member who has served as a cabinet minister said. "The declines (in the cabinet support rates) were unavoidable after the administration was criticized that much at the Diet."

"We won the head-on race with the opposition bloc thanks to the close cooperation between the LDP and Komeito," Abe said of the Kochi gubernatorial election, at a meeting of LDP executives held on Monday.

"The cherry blossom party issue would have been blamed if we had lost the gubernatorial race or won by a narrow margin," an LDP official said, showing a sense of relief at the election result.

Still, many in the ruling coalition are not optimistic about the situation.

Opposition parties are poised to continue to cooperate in grilling the Abe administration over the issue.

The opposition bloc "fared well" in the Kochi election, a senior official of the Constitutional Democratic Party of Japan said.

"The prime minister has not answered to questions over the scandal," Akira Koike, head of the Japanese Communist Party's secretariat, said at a press conference on Monday. Abe's "stance of not trying to explain the matter to the public has been slammed," Koike said.

JIJI Press