Tokyo, Sep 3 (DPA) The politician slated to be Japan's next prime minister vowed Thursday in a telephone call with US President Barack Obama to maintain his country's close ties with its US ally and pledged cooperation with Washington to improve the economy.

The state of US-Japanese ties has been a concern in the US capital with the landslide win of Yukio Hatoyama's Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) in Sunday's parliamentary elections. The vote ended more than 50 years of nearly uninterrupted rule by the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP).

The DPJ had opposed a top LDP and US priority, a Japanese refuelling mission in the Indian Ocean that supported anti-terrorism operations near Afghanistan, and it has objected to the terms of US troop deployments in Japan.

Hatoyama said during the election campaign that his party would maintain Japan's alliance with the US as a priority but cautioned, 'We want to move away from US dependency to a more equal alliance.'

In their first conversation, Hatoyama told Obama that he wanted 'constructive, future-oriented Japan-US relations', Japan's Kyodo News agency reported.