Following Prime Minister Koizumi’s dissolution of the Lower House of the Diet on Monday, the campaign for the election just one month from today is quickly accelerating. Mr. Koizumi seems to have been energized by the challenge, and if he goes down, he clearly intends to go down swinging.

This article from the Daily Mainichi reports on the latest polls, revealing that support for his Cabinet has climbed 9 percentage points to 46 percent. It is not uncommon for the LDP to do well in elections despite a Cabinet approval rating of less than 50 percent, and these polls show a substantial upswing. Voters also supported Koizumi’s decision to dissolve the Diet by a margin of 54 percent to 36 percent.

More intriguing is the balls-to-the-wall campaign tactics of Mr. Koizumi and his supporters, which are unusual for Japanese politics. The ruling Liberal Democratic Party has withdrawn support from their Lower House rebels who voted against the postal privatization bill, regardless of their status within the party, and announced they will run candidates in single-seat constituencies against every one of them.

They won’t be putting up empty suits, either. This article from the Daily Mainichi mentions the possibility that Heizo Takenaka, postal privatization minister and Koizumi’s right-hand man for policy, may leave his Upper House seat and take on faction head Shizuka Kamei, the most visible of the LDP MPs in the Lower House opposing the privatization measures. This is the Japanese political equivalent of mano-a-mano, and it is so atypical of this country’s poliical culture that I did a double-take when I read about it.

Takenaka (first photo) is an economist who is also the Minister of State for Economic and Fiscal Policy. Koizumi has increasingly relied on Takenaka since appointing him to the Cabinet soon after his selection as prime minister in 2001. It is unprecedented in Japan for a technocrat to have such a high profile in a political administration, and Takenaka’s profile has continued to rise over the past four years. He even ran for and was elected to an Upper House seat in last year’s election.

The article also notes that Environmental Minister Yuriko Koike will challenge another LDP postal privatization foe in a Tokyo district. Taken together, all of Mr. Koizumi’s steps, starting with the Diet dissolution, indicate that he will wage a full-scale frontal assault. This alone may sway public opinion to his side. Regardless of the outcome, it will not be the usual humdrum campaign; this one promises once-in-a-generation excitement.

In boxing, the key is beating the opponent to the punch, and Mr. Koizumi appears to have adopted that strategy. Meanwhile, the 37 LDP Lower House opponents can’t decide whether to form a new party or to maintain their ties to the LDP and try to rejoin the party after the election. Even if the LDP maintains enough seats to retain control of the government, victories by too many of Koizumi’s LDP foes will leave him no better off than where he started. That seems to be the reasoning behind running heavyweight candidates against his intra-party opponents.

Katsuya Okada (second photo), the head of the Democratic Party of Japan, the leading opposition party, has said the DPJ will try to conduct a campaign that is not solely a referendum on postal privatization. With the head of the normally hidebound LDP actually having introduced a far-ranging reform measure and taking his case directly to the people to overturn its defeat in the Diet, it remains to be seen whether the DPJ will be successful in changing the subject. Reform ordinarily would be the opposition trump card, but Mr. Koizumi is all over that issue. The Japanese economy is in the midst of a strong recovery, with corporate earnings higher than they’ve been in nearly 20 years, so that will not work in the opposition’s favor, either. The DPJ also has publicly called for an increase in the 5% consumption tax, a platform plank unlikely to find favor with the public. (To be fair, the LDP will probably hike the tax rate post-Koizumi, but the prime minister has promised not to raise the rates during his administration.)

Regardless of his resolve, Mr. Koizumi still faces an uphill fight to win enough seats in the Lower House to maintain power and then reintroduce the same legislation to the same MPs in the Upper House. A clue to his thinking may have been revealed on a segment broadcast on one of the morning discussion programs on TV. Commentators noted the prime minister’s admiration for Oda Nobunaga (image), a 16th century military leader who is considered one of the “Three Heroes” of Japanese unification. Oda was ruthless with defeated opponents, systematically killing them all and torching their headquarters. He crushed the first coalition of forces against him.

The prime minister could be taking a page from Oda’s book with his campaign tactics. He may want to watch his back, however. Oda was cornered in a surprise attack at his headquarters and committed hara-kiri with the building in flames around him.