Public support for Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's Cabinet edged up to 42.4 percent but remained behind the disapproval rate, as Abe struggles to dispel renewed cronyism allegations against him over a controversial state-owned land sale, a Kyodo News poll showed Sunday.

The approval rate was up 3.7 percentage points in the weekend survey, after the figure plunged in mid-March due to revelations that Finance Ministry bureaucrats had doctored documents on the cut-price land sale to a nationalistic school operator with ties to Abe's wife.

The disapproval rate for the Abe Cabinet stood at 47.5 percent, almost unchanged from the previous poll. A total of 65.0 percent said Abe bears responsibility over the document falsification issue while 27.5 percent thought otherwise.

A total of 72.6 percent of respondents, however, said they were dissatisfied with last week's testimony in parliament by a key former senior bureaucrat linked to the document-tampering scandal. He clearly denied Abe's role in the alteration of documents but failed to answer other key questions such as why the papers were altered.

Around 61 percent said Abe's wife Akie should also be summoned to the Diet to offer an explanation on the issue, down 4.6 percentage points from the previous survey.

(PM Shinzo Abe getting to know the visitors at Tokyo's Yoyogi Park on Sunday.)

Those calling for Finance Minister Taro Aso's resignation over the scandal dropped 4.7 percentage points to 47.3 percent.

On a government plan to seek media deregulation that involves abolishing a legal clause demanding broadcasters ensure political fairness, 61.3 percent opposed the move, while 23.0 percent showed support.

On the question on who should be elected in the ruling Liberal Democratic Party presidential election in September, Abe remained in third spot after former defense minister Shigeru Ishiba and Shinjiro Koizumi, a rising star in the LDP and a son of charismatic former Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi.

By party, the LDP won the largest rate of support at 39.1 percent, up 2.9 percentage points from the previous survey. The Constitutional Democratic Party of Japan, the largest opposition force in the House of Representatives, also saw its support increase 2.7 percentage points to 14.2 percent.

The respondents remained divided over an LDP proposal to revise the war-renouncing Article 9 of the postwar Constitution by adding an explicit reference to the Self-Defense Forces, with 42.5 percent in favor of the idea while 45.0 percent opposed it.

The survey, covering 732 randomly selected households with eligible voters as well as 1,131 mobile phone numbers, obtained responses from 509 and 511 people, respectively.

Since Abe commenced his second stint as prime minister in 2012, the lowest support rating recorded was 35.8 percent in July last year, when the government was reeling from a series of scandals, including the cronyism accusations that resurfaced recently.

In the previous survey conducted on March 17 and 18, the Cabinet support rate fell 9.4 percentage points to 38.7 percent.

(Abe strolls through Yoyogi Park amid the cherry blossoms in bloom.)