"It's comfortable to get rid of a tie," Koizumi said as he posed for photographers at the outset of the campaign, which was the top item of the midday news program on public broadcaster NHK.

Koizumi sported an open-neck blue shirt from Japan's subtropical island of Okinawa along with pale slacks.

His right-hand man, Chief Cabinet Secretary Hiroyuki Hosoda, showed up at a regular news conference in a light blue shirt and said the Japanese too readily accepted being hot in the summer.

"I hope it will become a trend to wear casual clothes on hot days without being so patient," Hosoda said.

Tsutomu Takebe, the usually conservatively dressed secretary general of Koizumi's Liberal Democratic Party, appeared on the first day of June wearing a pink open-neck shirt with a beige jacket.

There were some rebels, though.

Foreign Minister Nobutaka Machimura took off his tie but said he would put it back on for a meeting with visiting Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono.

Senior ruling-party member Toranosuke Katayama was wearing his usual dark suits. He said he would stick to his dress code unless the government designated the no-tie fashion as formal wear.

The government has provided brochures on how to dress well without a coat and tie but Koizumi has stopped short of issuing orders to his subordinates to follow his fashion lead.

The environment ministry wants the nation of the Kyoto Protocol to set air conditioning temperatures this summer no lower than 28 degrees Celsius degrees Fahrenheit) - possibly a bit hot for a suit-attired salaryman.

Environment Minister Yuriko Koike promoted the campaign in full-page newspaper advertisements Wednesday.

"If men take their ties off in summer, women in offices do not need blankets on their laps," the advertisement says.

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