A stunning election win by Japan's Democratic Party may not yield radical policy changes but could revolutionise how the country is governed - if the new leaders bring elite bureaucrats to heel.
Yukio Hatoyama's Democrats made curbing the clout of bureaucrats a key plank in their platform for last Sunday's election, when they trounced the Liberal Democratic Party that had ruled Japan for most of the past half-century.
They also want to focus spending directly on individual households rather than the industry groups and other special interest blocs that traditionally benefitted from LDP largess.
Those pledges - more than any ideological divide between security hawks and doves or free-market fans and big government advocates - distinguish the Democrats from their LDP rivals.
That means the world's second-biggest economy won't see big shifts toward either socialism or bare-knuckles capitalism, nor will it lurch too far from the US-Japan alliance as the core of Tokyo's diplomacy.
"The two parties don't divide along clear cleavages or ideologies or other basic principles," said Gerry Curtis, a professor at New York's Columbia University.
"But there are differences. The LDP sees the art of governing as based on the ability to maintain smooth alliances between the political leadership and the bureaucrats," he said.
"The DPJ sees the art of governing as the ability of the political leadership to impose its will on the bureaucrats."
Taking decisions away from ministry bureaucrats accustomed to having their way won't be easy, but cutting links built-up during decades of one-party dominance will be a huge step.
Critics fault the LDP for leaving too much up to bureaucrats, which has made it difficult for Japan to respond to deep problems such as a shrinking and rapidly ageing population. The Democrats also face the challenge, however, of finding allies inside the ministries to help implement their plans. Success could boost transparency, reduce corruption and lessen spending on pork-barrel public works that has helped to inflate Japan's public debt to the worst among advanced nations.
"A whole lot is going to change, and rapidly - on waste, corruption, governance reforms. That's what people want," said Steven Reed, a political science professor at Chuo University.
In a sign of just how difficult reining in bureaucrats could be, ministries submitted budget requests for the fiscal year from April 1 to Prime Minister Taro Aso's outgoing government on Monday, a day after the Democrats trounced the ruling bloc.
Democratic Party leaders had already promised to begin crafting a budget from scratch.
"I think they were following common practice as ministries, but at a time of a change in government, it was not welcome that they submitted their budget requests in a form unseen by the Democratic Party," Mr Hatoyama told reporters.
The Democrats' pledge to put more money in the hands of households through such steps as child allowances, aid for farmers and toll-free expressways has fanned financial market concerns the new government will have to increase public debt, already at 170 per cent of GDP, to finance its programmes.
But with voters already worried about the bulging debt burden of a fast-aging society as social security costs rise, the Democrats have good reason to shun profligate ways.
"I don't believe they will be a populist party because that is not popular in this country," Prof. Curtis said. "It's not popular in this country to throw money around." The LDP has long spanned the spectrum from nationalists to security doves and from advocates of big government support for society's weaker members to fans of free market principles.
The Democrats are a similarly mixed group, comprised of former LDP members, ex-socialists and younger conservatives.