Japan's opposition LDP ahead in surveys Japanese bond futures hit new highs on Thursday as opinion polls showed the main opposition Liberal Democratic party on course for a decisive win in an election little more than a week away. The rise in 10-year bond futures was fuelled by expectations of further monetary stimulus to boost flagging growth in the world's third-largest economy. Nationwide polls by three of Japan's leading dailies on Thursday showed the LDP, a firm proponent of more aggressive easing from the Bank of Japan, poised to seize more than half the seats in the country's lower house in the December 16 election. Shinzo Abe, the LDP leader in pole position to become prime minister, has said he will call for "unlimited" action by the BoJ to beat deflation, which has dogged Japan for most of the past 15 years. The poll in the left-leaning Asahi newspaper, which supports the incumbent Democratic party, found the LDP could take as many as 285 of the 480 lower house seats, while the DPJ could see the number of its seats plummet from 230 to 95. The LDP now holds 118 seats in the lower house. The right-leaning Yomiuri, Japan's biggest selling daily, forecast that the LDP and its political ally, New Komeito, could together take as many as 300 seats. On Thursday, Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda, in unusually impassioned language, insisted his party still had a chance of winning the election "if we turn ourselves into balls of fire and appeal to voters to the very end." Mr Noda, who has said a return of the LDP would be a backward step for Japan, admitted that the DPJ's election prospects were "grim" but said the public would "share our view that Japanese politics needs to move forward." Takao Toshikawa, editor of Insideline, a political newsletter, said the ruling party's dwindling support was "a reflection of public anger with the DPJ which exposed its lack of experience running the government and lack of leadership." The uncertainty facing the DPJ is such that Mr Noda has taken the unusual step of running in both his local constituency in Chiba prefecture, northeast of Tokyo, and in the wider surrounding district where winners are selected from party lists by proportional representation. Such "double registration" is seen as a sign of weakness and Mr Noda is only the second prime minister to take out this insurance policy. Mr Noda's education minister, Makiko Tanaka, a six-term parliamentarian whose family has had a stranglehold on its rural constituency for decades, has also double-registered for the first time. A victory for the LDP in the lower house elections would still leave Japan with the problem of a hung parliament, since the DPJ is the largest party in the upper house, where it holds 90 seats. Additional reporting by Jonathan Soble in Niigata