Over the past month or more, Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi has told the nation time and again that he is determined to fight forces opposed to change. Now he is coming to the point where he must show he means what he says. The immediate challenge is to flesh out his vision of "structural reform with no sacred cows."

That slogan moved a step closer to reality last week when a blue-ribbon government advisory panel released a draft policy package concerning economic and fiscal management and structural reform. The package was put together by a task force headed by Economics Minister Heizo Takenaka and private members of the Council on Economic and Fiscal Policy.

The proposed policy guidelines call for a broad range of reforms. These include liquidating bad bank debts, creating a recycling-oriented society, redistributing tax revenues set aside for public-works projects, revamping the social-security system, cutting central-government subsidies to local governments and achieving a "primary" budget balance through restricted debt issues.

These and other proposals, to be worked out in more detail by the end of this month, are the building blocks of the "Koizumi reform." So far, so good. But the devil is in the details. As the focus moves from generalities to specifics, Mr. Koizumi will come under greater pressure from forces anxious to defend the status quo, including old-guard members of his own party. That will be a real test of his leadership.

Members of the panel, which he chairs, must be equally determined to maintain the momentum for reform, keeping in mind what Mr. Koizumi said in his policy speech to the Diet: Reform must be promoted without fear of pain, without yielding to vested interests and without regard for past experience.

The forces of resistance are formidable. Politicians, bureaucrats and businesses alike are trying to preserve vested interests. Mandarins in the government office are keen to protect their turf, despite the recent bureaucratic shakeup. To push his reform agenda, Mr. Koizumi must clear these hurdles.

Already his pitch to free up captive road taxes -- a sacred cow his predecessors dared not touch -- is coming under attack from local governments. The idea is supported only by the governors of key urban prefectures, such as Tokyo, Osaka and Aichi (Nagoya). Even the reformist governor of rural Nagano, who is calling for a halt to wasteful public-works projects like dam construction, is opposed.

Some other reform plans are raising the hackles of the central-government bureaucracy. For instance, the Ministry of Public Management, Home Affairs, Posts and Telecommunications (Somusho) is dead set against cutting public-investment subsidies to local governments. The Health, Labor and Welfare Ministry is bristling at the notion that a segment of the government-managed pension program for corporate employees should be privately managed.

The policy panel itself is taking a cautious stand on many of the specific items in the reform program. For example, private members' proposals to privatize Haneda and Narita airports, the road and petroleum public corporations and local water services have been shelved on the grounds that they were not coordinated with the government offices concerned.

The ruling parties, meanwhile, are unhappy that Mr. Koizumi and Finance Minister Masajuro Shiokawa are rushing toward reform over their heads. At stake is the style of leadership. Mr. Koizumi is trying to change the traditional "bottom-to-top" policymaking approach that involves a lot of spadework, such as bureaucratic consultations with ministers and party leaders, before final decisions are made. He is doing the opposite, making policy from top to bottom.

That is part of the reason why the prime minister's "big push" is drawing fire from the bureaucracy and the governing parties, particularly from Liberal Democratic Party legislators with ties to interest groups. In this, they are going against the popular aspiration for a strong prime minister. They do not seem to realize why the Prime Minister's Office was reorganized into a more powerful Cabinet Office and why the Council on Fiscal and Economic Policy was created with the participation of private experts.

As the reformist prime minister ventures into treacherous territory, the public must stand solidly behind him. At the same time, we must know who is really opposed to reform. But we must also beware of the enemy within ourselves. As Mr. Koizumi points out, reform will entail pain for many people. Indeed, all our lives will be affected one way or the other. But Japan cannot be remade into a better society without reforms.