Japan's main opposition leader insisted Friday that the time is ripe for his party to seize power in upcoming elections, even as he apologized for the latest financial scandal to hit his party, AP reported. Yukio Hatoyama, leader of the Democratic Party of Japan, said his lawyers discovered his office had falsified his donors' list to include people who have died. No criminal charges have been brought against Hatoyama and his office in the scandal. «I offer my apologies to the people of this nation,» Hatoyama told reporters at the Japan Press Center in Tokyo. «I must accept the criticism that I was careless about trusting my aide.» He said he did not know how or why the false report occurred and that his aide may have been trying to cover up a numbers error. Before the scandal emerged, the Democratic Party of Japan had been well placed to make major gains or even rise to power in upcoming general elections. Hatoyama had widely been viewed as the biggest and most realistic threat to Prime Minister Taro Aso. Aso's Liberal Democratic Party has governed Japan for most of the past 50 years, but he has struggled to win public support since he took office in September 2008. General elections must take place by October at the latest. Hatoyama said it was time for a new era in Japanese politics and that the country should be inspired by President Barack Obama's win in last year's elections in the United States, Japan's most important ally. «People are looking for change,» Hatoyama said. «What happened in the U.S. is all about change.» The Democratic Party of Japan has promised to improve welfare measures, lower the cost of education, reduce bureaucracy and strengthen the agricultural sector. Hatoyama said he would propose to the ruling Liberal Democrats that the two parties jointly set up a crisis management group to respond to natural disasters and other emergencies. He became the head of the Democratic Party of Japan in May after his predecessor Ichiro Ozawa resigned in a separate political funding scandal. Ozawa's political funding organization has been accused of receiving 21 million yen ($216,000 when the scandal surfaced) in illegal donations from 2003 to 2006. A senior aide to Ozawa was arrested on charges of violating political funding laws. Ozawa was not personally implicated in the scandal but he resigned, he said, to salvage the party's image.
