Tokyo - Naoto Kan was chosen as Japan's prime minister by parliament Friday as his Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) tries to regain popularity one month before an upper house election.
Kan, who served as finance minister and deputy prime minister in outgoing prime minister Yukio Hatoyama's cabinet, became Japan's 94th premier, the fifth since 2006.
The incoming premier agreed with the People's New Party that the two parties would continue their government coalition, said Kan, who is to name a new cabinet Tuesday.
Kan is to pick Yoshito Sengoku as chief cabinet secretary and Yukio Edano as the party's secretary general, news reports said.
While attention was focused on how much influence Ichiro Ozawa, the DPJ's powerful former secretary general, would wield in the new cabinet, observers said picking Sengoku and Edano was a move by Kan to distance himself from the "shadow shogun."
Kan suggested Thursday that Ozawa "should keep quiet at least for a while" for the sake of the country as his political funding scandals helped erode public trust in the DPJ.
The DPJ has pledged to give priority to economic and employment policies while reforming Japan's costly and cumbersome bureaucracy.
Within Hatoyama's cabinet, Kan, as deputy prime minister and minister of state for national strategy policy and economic and fiscal policy, played a major role in reshaping how the government worked.
In January, he was named finance minister after then-incumbent Hirohisa Fujii stepped down for health reasons. Kan then dropped the post of national strategy minister.
Kan has spent most of his political career on domestic issues and lacks diplomatic experience. He said, however, that he wants the country's Self-Defense Forces to expand its overseas role.
Kan also stressed the importance of Japan's relations with the United States while saying that it also needed at the same time to strengthen ties with other Asian countries.
"The Japan-US alliance is the cornerstone while we need to work for prosperity in Asia," Kan said.
Hatoyama announced his resignation Wednesday, eight months after taking office, as calls for him to go grew within the DPJ ahead of the upper house election in July. He and his cabinet stepped down earlier Friday.
The DPJ won a historic landslide victory in the August general election, ending more than a half-century of almost uninterrupted rule by the Liberal Democratic Party.
Since he took office in September, Hatoyama had seen the steady decline of his public approval ratings. His flip-flop on a promise to locate a US military base off the island of Okinawa helped erode his popularity, analysts said.
Hatoyama, who pledged to develop an equal partnership with the US, Japan's top ally, agreed in the end to relocate the base to a less-populated area of the island despite fierce local opposition.
Kan continued to distance himself from the issue, but as the new prime minister, he told a news conference Friday that he would stick to the decision of the previous administration.
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