Paper prepared for delivery at The American Political Science Association Annual Meeting in Toronto, Canada, September 3-6, 2009. Panel Title: Leadership and Policy Change in the Era of Complexity. In 1994 Japan instituted an electoral and campaign finance reform that changed its electoral system from SNTV to MMM, and in 2001 instituted an administrative reform that provided more authoritative influence in the cabinet to the prime minister, among other changes. There have now been five elections under the new electoral system, enough time to assess how political leadership in Japan responded to these changes and what constituted successful techniques and strategies of political leadership to accomplish policy change before and after institutional reform. This paper will compare the two most successful examples of prime ministerial 'entrepreneurial initiation' leadership under the ruling Liberal Democratic Party from 1955-2009. First, Prime Minister Nakasone (1982-1987) prior to the post-1994 reforms, succeeded in passing an administrative reform that privatized major public corporations in the face of resistance from bureaucrats, the public corporations and labor unions. Second, Prime Minister Koizumi (2001-2006) after the reforms accomplished a major postal system (including the massive postal savings program) privatization over the rebellion and opposition of several key members of his own party. We then will analyze the techniques of leadership used by Nakasone and Koizumi, why they succeeded when those of the other prime ministers in the same institutional context failed to accomplish reform, and how these varied in the different institutional contexts in which they operated. We find that the key common heresthetic techniques were manipulating issue dimensions, managing their media strategy and image, issue framing, and ability to understand how to manipulate the institutional capabilities and political context of their office at the time, among other factors. Koizumi’s techniques, however, had the potential to be more systemically transformative than Nakasone’s: using the new capabilities of institutional reform his leadership bode to change the entire policymaking process and nature of his party. This potential was totally dissipated by his unskillful successors, and the LDP lost power in the August 30 2009 election