Dissolution of the Ministry of Munitions and Reversion to Commerce Ministry

The Ministry of Munitions had been created on 1 November 1943 by Imperial Ordinance No. 824, merging most of the Ministry of Commerce and Industry with the national mobilization division of the Planning Board; it was the central organ directing wartime munitions output, above all aircraft production, while the Commerce Ministry's civilian functions went to the Ministry of Agriculture and Commerce set up the same day. Shiina Etsusaburō (椎名悦三郎) was director of its General Mobilization Bureau from the start and a close subordinate of the first vice-minister, Kishi Nobusuke; when the Suzuki Kantarō cabinet was formed in April 1945 he was promoted to Vice-Minister of Munitions. By the end of the war the ministry embodied Japan's wartime controlled economy.

Japan announced its surrender on 15 August 1945, and the Higashikuni cabinet took office on 17 August with the aircraft manufacturer Nakajima Chikuhei as the last Minister of Munitions. On 26 August — before the Allied advance party reached Atsugi and before MacArthur arrived — the ministry was abolished and the Ministry of Commerce and Industry restored, with Nakajima becoming Commerce Minister and asking Shiina to stay on as vice-minister. The dissolution of the Ministry of Munitions on August 26, 1945 was a calculated bureaucratic maneuver led by Vice-Minister Shiina, who would later become a powerful conservative politician in postwar Japan. By preemptively reverting the Munitions Ministry to the Commerce Ministry before the Allied occupation authorities could impose their own reorganization, Shiina removed the 'munitions' label and preserved the core bureaucratic apparatus and personnel. The Munitions Companies Act was also repealed in 1945, ending the system of designated munitions companies.

Once the reorganization was in hand, Shiina resigned as Vice-Minister of Commerce and Industry on 12 October 1945 when the Higashikuni cabinet fell, and left the civil service. He was purged from public office in November 1947 and depurged in 1951, and later served as Foreign Minister and Vice-President of the Liberal Democratic Party.

The restored Commerce Ministry was subsequently reorganized into the Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI) on May 25, 1949, which became the engine of Japan's postwar industrial policy and economic miracle and is the predecessor of today's Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry. The experience of industrial control and the personal networks built up in the Munitions Ministry thus carried over into the postwar period, and Japanese politics still uses the term 'shōkō-zoku' for legislators close to this ministry. Note that English Wikipedia describes the ministry as having been abolished by the American occupation authorities, whereas Japanese sources consistently record a reorganization by the Japanese government itself on 26 August.