TOKYO -- With a week left before the Sept. 29 vote to decide the next president of Japan's ruling Liberal Democratic Party, the four candidates are ramping up their campaigns on social media and other channels amid the coronavirus pandemic.

Watching their efforts, this reporter was reminded of an unusual question from former LDP Secretary-General Koichi Kato while reporting on the leadership race 22 years ago.

The LDP election in 1999 was a three-way race between Kato, the incumbent Prime Minister Keizo Obuchi, and former party policy chief Taku Yamasaki. Considered the eventual successor to Obuchi, Kato's decision to run that year instead of "waiting his turn" triggered significant pushback within the LDP.

Still, Kato wanted to fight for the LDP president's chair.

"Do you know what a dog sled is?" Kato had asked this reporter back then in an office building in Akasaka, where the LDP's Kochi faction was based. Kato was a member of this influential faction.

Kato then began recounting the 1978 election, when then-faction leader Masayoshi Ohira challenged incumbent Takeo Fukuda.

The LDP that year held a primary for the first time, allowing party members and affiliates to cast their ballot before national lawmakers voted in the final election.

Ohira was backed by former Prime Minister Kakuei Tanaka and was seen as a frontrunner among lawmakers. But Fukuda was expected to command a major lead among rank-and-file party members, and Fukuda himself was counting on those votes as well.

Kato, who was a second-term lawmaker at the time, visited Ohira's home in Tokyo in the midst of the primary to seek financial support. Before he could voice his request, however, Ohira asked him if he knew what a dog sled was.

"A dog sled is a sled that's pulled by dogs," Ohira continued as Kato mulled the implications of the question. "There are many different kinds of dogs. Some look like they are pulling hard but aren't, while some look like they are slacking off when they are actually running as hard as they can."

Kato quickly left, believing Ohira was comparing him to the latter. Ohira later won the primary in an upset. Fukuda bowed out before the final vote, saying that "sometimes the voice of heaven says strange things."

Kato played an instrumental role in Ohira's campaign and eventual victory, and was appointed deputy chief cabinet secretary in the new government.

But Kato himself lost to Obuchi in the 1999 LDP race. Then, when Obuchi fell ill, Yoshiro Mori stepped in as party chief and prime minister. Kato later supported the opposition's no-confidence motion against Mori in an attempt to topple the government, though his so-called rebellion ultimately failed and he never became prime minister.

Roughly 1.1 million party members and affiliates will be participating in this year's race. They account for 382 votes, while national lawmakers account for another 382.

But unlike in the 1978 race, both party members and lawmakers will be voting on the same day. When party member ballots are counted first, they tend to have an impact on how lawmakers vote -- like it did during Junichiro Koizumi's landslide victory in the 2001 election.

Same-day votes remove this influence, though lawmakers are said to take party member votes into consideration when the election goes into a runoff.

Still, in 2012, former Defense Minister Shigeru Ishiba lost to Shinzo Abe in the runoff despite winning more party member votes in the first round.

The number of votes allocated to party members this year will shrink to 47 -- one for each prefecture -- in a runoff, giving lawmakers a much larger say.

Alliances between the different campaigns will determine the outcome in such a scenario. But it is unclear how well the various LDP factions can coordinate. Several could not even decide on one candidate to back in the initial vote, making it extremely difficult to project the outcome of the race.

Of course, the biggest priority for the four candidates is securing greater support before that initial vote.

Candidates apparently can easily tell who on their team is working hard and who is just skating by. Election watchers will need to step into the candidates' shoes to understand the machinations behind the vote and predict key appointments should they win.