Japan's Prime Minister Naoto Kan survived a no-confidence vote Thursday after pledging to step down once the country is on the road to recovery from the March 11 quake and nuclear disaster.

The promise to hand over power to a younger generation appeased internal party rebels who had threatened to bring down Kan, the country's fifth premier in as many years, days before his first anniversary in the job.

The motion brought by the opposition conservative Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and its allies was defeated by a comfortable 293-152 margin after most lawmakers of the centre-left ruling party fell into line behind Kan.

Kan, 64, in a last-minute appeal to his fractured Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ), urged its lawmakers to stick together until he makes significant progress in rebuilding from Japan's worst post-war emergency.

"Once my handling of the earthquake disaster is settled to some extent and I have fulfilled my role to some extent, I would like younger generations to take over my various responsibilities," the prime minister told a DPJ meeting.

Kan, a self-styled "son-of-a-salaryman", or man of the people, offered no precise milestone, leaving his departure date open to interpretation.

The government has promised that most of the 100,000 people still living in shelters after the quake disaster will be in temporary housing by mid-summer, but the wider clean-up and reconstruction is expected to take years.

The operator of the tsunami-hit Fukushima nuclear power plant has said it hopes to bring its six reactors to "cold shutdown" between October and January, but decommissioning and decontaminating the site will also take far longer.

When asked at a late-night press conference to specify when he will step down, Kan remained vague, pointing to the need to stabilise the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant.

He also said he might keep parliament open until December rather than end the current session later this month.

The LDP -- which was ousted by a landslide in a 2009 election after more than half a century of almost unbroken rule -- have accused Kan of bungling the response to the disaster that left more than 23,000 dead and missing.

Kan's arch-rival within the DPJ, scandal-tainted veteran powerbroker Ichiro Ozawa, threatened to vote against the prime minister but in the end abstained, and only two DPJ lawmakers ended up voting with the opposition.

Had Kan been ousted, it would have perpetuated Japan's much-criticised revolving-door leadership of recent years, even as the world's number-three economy struggles with flagging growth and a huge public debt mountain.

LDP secretary general Nobuteru Ishihara called the vote result "unfortunate" and complained about Kan's "very fuzzy and irresponsible remarks".

"The prime minister said he will quit once the work of earthquake reconstruction is finished to 'some extent'," Ishihara said.

"But there is no milestone in sight even for the nuclear accident. There is no clear strategy for rebuilding after the earthquake."

The political bickering at a time of crisis has dismayed many Japanese.

The Asahi Shimbun daily said in an editorial that the Diet's duty is to make laws and budgets to speed disaster recovery and that "we feel strong resentment at the lawmakers who are brazenly playing power games."

Takuya Tasso, governor of tsunami-hit Iwate prefecture, said: "I hope that they will soon form a united front to save the nation and focus on the reconstruction of Japan and providing assistance to disaster victims."

Japan Business Federation (Keidanren) chairman Hiromasa Yonekura called for a grand coalition of the major parties so they can join hands on reconstruction efforts, the Kyodo News agency reported.

"We would like the ruling and opposition parties to cooperate and jointly promote reconstruction," he was quoted as saying in Beijing.

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