Some 65.8 percent of voters were against the Diet's passage earlier in the month of a bill to accept more foreign blue-collar workers from April, a Kyodo News poll showed Sunday.

In a nationwide opinion poll conducted Saturday and Sunday, 24.8 percent of respondents said they support the Diet's approval of the bill to accept up to 345,150 foreign migrant workers over five years to address the nation's labor shortage.

The ruling coalition, led by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's Liberal Democratic Party, steamrolled the bill through the Lower House in late November despite opposition criticism that the hastily crafted bill lacked details. The bill cleared the Upper House on Dec. 8.