Headlines declared Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's landslide election victory this month the beginning of a "new political era," a mandate for economic change and a triumph for reform.

Sure, the Japanese public's appetite for serious reform could snap the country out of its political doldrums. Meaningful and broad reform could sustain the current economic recovery. And success in these areas could help Japan recover its international political voice, offering a healthy counter to China and stronger support for the United States in trans-Pacific politics.

But this is Japan, home of the politics of personality and stronghold of corrupt single-party rule for the last half-century. Reform may be more elusive than ever. As former Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone once described Japanese politics: "You can see ahead for about three inches in front of you; after that, it's total darkness."

Start with Koizumi. Japanese voters, politicians and, especially, bureaucrats — the people who really run the country — prefer their leaders "lite" and drab. Occasionally a strong personality breaks through. Nakasone was one: He used television to go directly to the people and get things done. But he and similar leaders were also organization men.

Not Koizumi. Divorced, rock music lover, fluent speaker and fashion plate with blow-dried hair, he is a henjin (translated variously as "eccentric" or "weirdo").

Although a second-generation member of the parliament, he's not a party man but a lone wolf whose spasmodic reform campaigns recall the Leninist model of two steps forward, one step back.

Koizumi and his economics chief, Heizo Takenaka, unclogged Japan's debt-constricted banks. But the prime minister has not touched the country's antiquated pension system, and his foreign policy record is mixed, at best. And Koizumi's repeated visits to the Yasukuni Shrine, with its museum honoring past war criminals, have worsened relations with China and South Korea, where memories of Japanese atrocities are still fresh.

But Koizumi has consistently fought for legislation to privatize Japan's state-owned postal system, which is a financial giant with $3 trillion in savings and insurance assets. His fellow Liberal Democrats have long used Japan Post, along with the Public Highways Corp., as slush funds to finance expensive public works projects to attract rural voters and reward crony contractors and crooked business lobbyists.

It was after old-guard opponents inside his party voted down the postal privatization bill that Koizumi boldly called for the parliamentary elections on this issue. He recruited high-profile newcomers, many of them women, to run against the old-line dons he booted out of the party. And when the votes were counted — a record 67.5 percent turned out — Koizumi and his "female ninjas" won big.

The Liberal Democratic Party is now ostensibly Koizumi's party, which should be good news for reformers. The trouble is, the prime minister's victory knocked out the opposition Democratic Party of Japan, which is generally pro-reform, effectively pushing a sound two-party system further off into the country's future.

In fact, many of the Liberal Democrats who survived the election backed postal reform principally out of fear. They will probably seek to water down any reforms now that they have kept their seats.

Koizumi's term as party president, and thus prime minister, ends in September 2006, and he says he will not seek an extension. He is not known for consistency. But unless he is prepared for an unrelenting Herculean effort to clean up the vested interests of some 50 years' standing, his reforms will be sabotaged, even killed. The laws privatizing Japan Post and the Highway Corp. must be reintroduced and will take years to execute.

There are plenty of other problems to solve: the swollen public debt, the country's rapidly graying population, healthcare improvements, revision of the postwar pacifist constitution, the drive for a Japanese seat on the U.N. Security Council and public anxiety over the Japanese support force in Iraq. There was scant mention of any of these issues in Koizumi's election campaign.

About 20 years ago, Nakasone successfully battled entrenched interests to privatize the costly and outmoded Japan National Railways system. With that victory and his sponsorship of other economic reforms, he earned himself an additional year in office, after which the Liberal Democrats went back to business as usual under his successor.

Koizumi is not about to follow Nakasone's footsteps too far. He unceremoniously kicked Nakasone out of the party two years ago. If by some chance he can hold the voters with him and clean up his party, he will have performed a political miracle — shining some welcome light into the usual total darkness.

Frank Gibney, president of the Pacific Basin Institute at Pomona College, is the author of "The Pacific Century," "Japan, the Fragile Super-Power" and other books on Asia. He wrote this commentary for the Los Angeles Times.