LDP win redraws Japan's political map Japanese voters have radically redrawn the country's political map for the second time in three years, handing a decisive supermajority to the conservative Liberal Democratic party in an election where concerns about the economy appeared to trump issues such as nuclear power and China. With all votes counted on Monday, the LDP will control 294 seats in the 480-seat lower house - about as many as the humiliated Democratic party (DPJ) won in 2009 when it swept out the LDP after five decades of nearly uninterrupted rule. Together with its smaller partner, Komeito, the Liberal Democrats will control 325 seats, more than the two-thirds majority needed to pass legislation opposed by the Diet's upper chamber, where no party holds a majority. Gridlock between the two houses over the past three years helped stymie the DPJ on issues from deficit financing to election reform, eroding its credibility with voters. On Monday morning, the Nikkei stock average rose 1.4 per cent, briefly topping 9,900 for the first time in more than eight months, while the yen weakened slightly to Y84 per US dollar. Markets had expected victory for the Liberal Democrats, who have promised to stimulate the economy by spending more on infrastructure and by pressuring the Bank of Japan to tackle deflation and weaken the yen. In the month leading up to the election, the Nikkei gained 12 per cent while the yen gave up 5 per cent against the dollar, a boon for export-dependent manufacturers. In an illustration of the scale of the rout, eight cabinet ministers from the outgoing DPJ government failed to win re-election. Other major DPJ figures, including former prime minister Naoto Kan, lost in their single-seat districts, but managed to stay in the Diet through a parallel proportional representation contest. Three hundred of the legislature's 480 lower-house seats are decided in winner- take-all constituencies, while the rest are filled by proportional representation. Despite the national trauma caused by the Fukushima nuclear accident last year, parties that made reducing or eliminating atomic power a central theme in their campaigns fared poorly. The newly formed Tomorrow party, which includes prominent anti-nuclear activists, won only nine seats, while the anti-nuclear Social Democrats and Communists together won only 10. In a poll of voters by NHK, Japan's state-run broadcaster, only 10 per cent of respondents ranked energy policy as the most important issue in the election, compared with half who named the economy and jobs. The role of primary opposition in the lower house will be split between the DPJ, which was reduced to 57 seats, and a new rightwing populist party, Restoration, which won 54. The free-market Your Party won 18 seats, more than doubling its previous tally of eight. Shinzo Abe, the LDP leader and presumptive prime minister, had struck a nationalist tone during the campaign on issues such as Japan's dispute with China over islands in the East China Sea. In comments to Japanese media late Sunday night, Mr Abe said he would "stop the challenge" from China over the Japanese-controlled islands, but also promised to make efforts to improve relations with Beijing. Additional reporting by Josh Noble in Hong Kong