TOKYO, Japan?Japan's ruling party lost a local election at the weekend amid funding scandals as a poll showed support for Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama's cabinet almost halved since he took office five months ago.

Former Nagasaki vice governor Hodo Nakamura, 59, won a landslide victory over former bureaucrat Tsuyoshi Hashimoto, 40, a candidate backed by the ruling party, in Sunday's gubernatorial election in the southern prefecture.

Nakamura beat Hashimoto by 316,603 votes to 222,565 with backing from the opposition Liberal Democratic Party and the New Komeito party, which were ousted from power in September by Hatoyama's Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ).

The election loss came after a series of accounting irregularities that have led to the indictment of former aides of Hatoyama and DPJ heavyweight Ichiro Ozawa.

The election, seen as a prelude to elections for the national parliament's upper house in July, "showed the 'money-and-politics' problems... are dampening the DPJ's steam," the nationwide daily Mainichi Shimbun reported Monday.

A weekend survey of 2,161 people, published Monday in the Asahi Shimbun, found public support for Hatoyama's cabinet at 37 percent, down from 41 percent only about two weeks ago.

The latest reading is nearly half the 71 percent the Hatoyama cabinet won in the liberal paper's opinion poll immediately after the new government took office in mid-September.