A political institute to be established by popular Osaka Mayor Toru Hashimoto's local political party Osaka Ishin no Kai (Osaka restoration group) has attracted many "ambitious" Japanese.

The party's working committee tasked with setting up the institute told Xinhua Tuesday that more than 400 people had already applied by Tuesday for the training course, adding that they included active government bureaucrats, former Diet members who lost their seats, office workers, lawyers, and even housewives from all over the country.

The political institute,Ishin Seijijuku (Ishin political institute), is expected to be established in March and begin training candidates for Japan's next general election.

According to Japanese press reports, Hashimoto's party plans to field 300 candidates in the next general election for the 480- seats House of Representatives, hoping to win 200 seats.

Analysts noted, by actively expanding his local political party' s influence, Hashimoto, regarded as young and popular reformer, aims at fulfilling his campaign pledge to establish "Osaka Megtropolitan Government" by merging both the city of Osaka and Osaka Prefecture.

After winning the Osaka mayoral race in a landslide last November, Hashimoto has sought chances that Japan's Diet ( parliament) will revise a series of related laws to allow the creation of "Osaka Metropolitan Government".

Hashimoto's strategy now is to ensure the realization of his political goal even if such legislation does not pass the Diet before the House of Representatives is dissolved.

While Hashimoto started to conduct, as mayor of Osaka City, a series of drastic measures to cut costs and reduce a bureaucratic overlap between the city and the prefecture, he repeatedly had talks with key Diet members of both ruling Democratic Party of Japan and opposition political parties including Liberal Democratic Party mainly to share his political idea of creating the metropolitan government.

But he recently told Japanese media that because members of the DPJ and the LDP had different views, he could not expect any " change" from them, noting that he needed to gather other members who can support the same political ideas and act together.

Meanwhile, Yoshimi Watanabe, President of Your Party, expressed in January at the party convention in Tokyo that he would act together with Hashimoto's party on issues such as local autonomy and reform of the public employee system.

During the meeting, Watanabe stressed his party's friendship with Hashimoto, appealing that the party's central agenda is much the same as that of Osaka Ishin no Kai. He intended to jointly field candidates in 300 single-seats constituencies in the next lower house election.

There is another politician to be seeking an alliance with Hashimoto. Hideaki Omura,governor of Aichi Prefecture in central Japan, expressed in January that he was also planning to establish a political institute in April, with the aim of fielding candidates for the next lower house election.

Omura wants to enlist about 100 applicants mainly from Aichi and its neighboring prefectures, which form a proportional representation section of the lower house election.

Omura, who has a vision of establishing a "Chukyo metropolis," is promoting a three-metropolis (Tokyo, Osaka and Nagoya) concept.

Political analyst Akihiro Otani told Xinhua that while Hashimoto is stepping up measures to realize his political ideas including revision of the Local Autonomy Law to create an Osaka metropolitan government, he completely understands the political limitation to do so as long as he is "a local politician".

Rather, Otani pointed out, whether his regional political agenda is successfully drawn up or not, Hashimoto apparently intends to use his current popularity to influence on national politics with the strategy of fielding candidates for the general election as many as possible.

But, since Hashimoto has hardly made reference to national policies such as social security, diplomacy, raising the consumption tax rate or even urgent measures to reduce the impact of yen appreciation, it is not clear that those "will-be candidates" are able to sort out prioritized nationwide political themes from local interests.

Otani added that the next general election will be a test-case for the country's politics to see whether Hashimoto's popularity and his current political strategy are really able to change the traditional relationship between the central and local governments.