Remember when privatisation used to be a progressive, even radical policy? When it was about breaking up inefficient monopolies, not just about channelling money to fund managers and corporate advisers? Those days might have passed in Australia, but we can still see them in Japan, where the first of this month’s big elections is coming up on 11 September.

Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi called the election following the defeat in parliament of his plan to privatise Japan’s post office. The move seems to be paying off; the latest opinion poll, published in Asahi Shimbun, shows his Liberal Democratic Party has opened up a big lead over the opposition.

After decades as a virtual one-party state, Japan in recent years had been moving to a more normal two-party system, with the conservative LDP and the centre-left Democratic Party. At the last election, in 2003, the two were almost level in terms of votes, but the LDP (in conjunction with its ally, the Komeito or Clean Government Party) won a clear majority due to the weighting given to rural seats, which were its strongest area.

Now, however, Koizumi has broken that pattern by running as a reformer. The Democratic Party is caught in a bind; it is not opposed to privatisation in principle, and has little in common with the LDP dissidents who defeated the privatisation bill. Sure enough, the polls show that Koizumi’s gains are coming in more in the cities and less in the conservative rural areas.

Like left-wing parties elsewhere, the opposition is pinning its hopes on the Iraq war, as The Australian‘s Peter Alford reported this week. Japan’s commitment of troops is deeply unpopular, although so far this does not seem to be hurting Koizumi. But with parties in flux, a complex electoral system and plenty of voters yet to make up their minds (The Age reports 40% undecided, although like most such figures this should be treated with scepticism), things could easily change in the final week.

You can find more background, including comprehensive past election results, on Adam Carr’s Psephos site, and there’s a wonderful set of constituency-level electoral maps on Wikipedia.