Japan's Democratic Party said Tuesday that it was ready to do battle with powerful state bureaucrats to reduce their tight grip over the world's number two economy, after sweeping weekend elections.

The centre-left Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ), which scored a stunning victory in Sunday's legislative polls, has made wresting power from civil servants one of its main policy goals.

"The bureaucracy is using politicians," DPJ lawmaker Jin Matsubara said on the private TV Asahi network, deploring the practice of politicians rubber-stamping decisions by unelected officials.

Matsubara argued bureaucrats were so specialised and focused on their fields of work and the interests of their ministries that they often fail to have a comprehensive view of what would benefit ordinary people.

"There is a saying 'specialty fool'," he said, using a local expression for specialists who lack wider common sense. "We shouldn't be like that."

Political observers say Japan's 360,000 state bureaucrats wield far greater clout than their peers in other democracies when it comes to steering policy.

The heads of ministries, who carry the rank of vice minister, are often considered more powerful than the politicians they ostensibly serve.

When top bureaucrats retire, they tend to parachute into cushy jobs in the companies and agencies they formerly supervised -- a practice that critics say encourages corruption.

Premier-in-waiting Yukio Hatoyama has pledged to deploy 100 lawmakers to supervise ministries.

Hirofumi Hirano, a close aide to Hatoyama, said the DPJ and the bureaucrats had already drawn swords for an imminent battle.

"We are poised, watching who will stab first or be stabbed," he said in footage aired on TV Asahi.

Crucially the DPJ is fighting to wrest back control of the budget process from the finance ministry.

"So far, the finance ministry has stapled together budget requests from individual ministries and agencies and then the cabinet rubber stamps it," said the deputy head of the DPJ policy research panel, Renho, an upper-house member who goes by one name.

From now on a new National Strategy Bureau would set policies and help draft the national budget under the premier's control, she said.

The DPJ has pledged direct cash handouts to families with small children and subsidies to farmers rather

than aid money channelled though organisations run by former bureaucrats.

Rather than raising taxes, the DPJ proposes funding its measures to boost household incomes by cutting wasteful government spending on public works projects and a bloated bureaucracy.

But some civil servants appear less eager, in public at least, for a fight than the DPJ, which won 308 seats in the 480-member lower house in Sunday's election, giving it a powerful mandate for change.

Vice minister Yasutake Tango, the top bureaucrat at the finance ministry, said Tuesday he was ready to follow instructions from a new government.

"We must work appropriately if a new government has a new policy," he told a news conference.

Hatoyama, a US-trained engineering scholar and scion of an old political dynasty, campaigned on a promise of change and people-centred politics against the outgoing conservatives, headed by fellow political blueblood Aso.

Hatoyama, who is expected to be appointed prime minister by parliament in a special session to be convened by mid-September, has given no clear hint on the lineup of his cabinet.

He has said he will form a coalition with the smaller Social Democratic Party of Japan and the People's New Party -- a tiny centre-right group formed by LDP defectors.