A man was arrested in the Japanese city of Osaka after allegedly plowing his car deliberately into seven schoolchildren on Thursday, local media said.

The children, who had been on their way home from school, were injured and rushed to hospital but all seven remained conscious, public broadcaster NHK and other outlets said.

The driver, Yuki Yazawa, is a 28-year-old unemployed man who lives in Tokyo and was driving a rental car. Osaka police arrested him on suspicion of attempted murder, the reports said, citing unidentified investigative sources.

NHK said the man admitted the charges to police and stated that he was "fed up with everything, so he rammed the car into them thinking to kill someone".

The car was "zigzagging" as it hit the children, with one girl "covered in blood and other kids suffering what appeared to be scratches", a witness told Nippon TV.

The man was wearing a surgical mask and "looked like he was in shock" after he was dragged out by school teachers, Nippon TV quoted a witness as saying.

Violent crime is rare in Japan but shocking incidents do sometimes occur.

In 2008, Tomohiro Kato rammed a rented two-tonne truck into a crowd of pedestrians in Tokyo's Akihabara district, before getting out and going on a stabbing spree, in an attack that killed seven people.

"I came to Akihabara to kill people. It didn't matter who I'd kill," he told police at the time.

Kato was later sentenced to death and hanged in 2022.