The House of Representatives passed the postal privatization bills at a plenary session on Tuesday afternoon.

Earlier in the day, the bills that would privatize Japan Post cleared the chamber's special committee on postal reform.

The package of six bills were immediately referred to the House of Councillors, which is expected to start deliberating on them on Wednesday and pass them into law on Friday at the earliest.

In addition to members of the ruling coalition, the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and Komeito, a majority of rebellious LDP legislators who voted against the bills in the previous voting session also supported them.

Former Posts and Telecommunications Minister Seiko Noda and many other rebels successfully ran in the Sept. 11 Lower House election as independents after the LDP refused to officially endorse them.

The privatization of Japan Post is the core of Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's structural reform policies.

The original bills barely cleared the Lower House as rebels voted against them in defiance of LDP leadership. However, after the Upper House killed the bills in August, Prime Minister Koizumi dissolved the Lower House for the Sept. 11 poll. Under the Constitution, the prime minister can dissolve only the Lower House.

After the ruling coalition scored a landslide victory in the general election, the government revised the bills to postpone the privatization by six months for technical reasons and submitted them to the Diet.

Under the bills, Japan Post, the public corporation that runs postal services, will be split into five private companies in October 2007.

Specifically, four entities -- a postal services company, a postal banking company, a postal life insurance firm and the operator of the nationwide post office network -- would be founded under a holding company.