Bernard Crick defined politics in terms of discussion and held that discussion entailed opposition. In Japanese politics opposition parties have very rarely replaced in power the dominant Liberal Democratic Party. The tendency for such parties to appease the ruling party has diluted the notion that they ought vigorously to compete for power. Japanese opposition parties have missed a succession of opportunities presented to them since the war. These include the coalition governments of the late 1940s, the Socialist confrontation with the LDP in the late 1950s over renewal of the Japan-US Security Treaty, the ‘Structural Reform’ movement of the early 1960s, the ‘Doi Takako boom’ of 1988–90, the Hosokawa and Hata coalition governments of 1993–4, the New Frontier Party of 1994–7 and the ‘postal privatization’ election of September 2005. Reform of the Lower House electoral system in the mid-1990s has opened the way towards more open and policy-based party politics, and weakened the politics of clientelism. For a while this greatly benefited the Democratic Party, but Prime Minister Koizumi used the defeat of the postal services privatization bill in August 2005 to modernize the LDP, consolidating its grip on power in the September elections.