Dissolution of the Home Ministry

The Home Ministry (内務省) was established on 10 November 1873 with Okubo Toshimichi as the first Home Minister (Lord of Home Affairs), and for more than seventy years it was the core of Japan's domestic administration. It was responsible for local administration and elections, controlled the prefectures through the governors it appointed and supervised, and commanded the national police, including the Special Higher Police (Tokko) that suppressed political and ideological dissent; censorship of publications, the administration of Shinto shrines, public works and public health also fell within its remit. Its health and social-welfare functions were separated to form the Ministry of Health and Welfare in 1938, but the ministry retained enormous power under the wartime system.

After the surrender, the Allied occupation authorities identified the Home Ministry as a principal instrument of prewar and wartime authoritarianism due to its concentration of police power, censorship authority, thought control, and local government supervision. On 4 October 1945 GHQ/SCAP issued a directive abolishing the Special Higher Police and state censorship, and large numbers of officials were dismissed; state administration of shrines was ended soon afterwards. The Constitution of Japan and the Local Autonomy Law, which came into force in May 1947, made prefectural governors elective and removed the basis of the ministry's control over local government, and GHQ went on to demand a thorough decentralisation of its powers.

On December 31, 1947 the ministry was formally dissolved under a law abolishing its organisation; the last Home Minister was Kimura Kozaemon. Its dissolution dispersed these functions among multiple independent agencies to prevent any future concentration of domestic control power. The police were reorganised under the new Police Law into the National Rural Police and municipal police forces supervised by public safety commissions (replaced in 1954 by the present system of the National Police Agency and prefectural police); the public-works bureau became the Construction Agency, upgraded to the Ministry of Construction in 1948; and local administration and elections passed to bodies such as the Local Finance Commission and the National Election Administration Commission.

These successor bodies were later regrouped. The local-administration line became the Ministry of Home Affairs (自治省) in 1960 and was merged into the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications in the central government reorganisation of 2001; the Ministry of Construction was absorbed into the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism in the same year; and health and labour administration is now handled by the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare. Japanese sources note that former Home Ministry bureaucrats long maintained contact and influence across the successor agencies, so that institutional dissolution did not immediately break continuity of personnel.