Ministry of Munitions

The Ministry of Munitions (軍需省) was established by Imperial Ordinance No. 824 on November 1, 1943 (Shōwa 18). Japan was then losing aircraft heavily in the attrition battles of the Solomons and New Guinea, and the Army and Navy were competing fiercely for aluminium, steel and factory capacity. The government therefore created the ministry by absorbing the industrial bureaus of the Ministry of Commerce and Industry (商工省) and the national mobilization division of the Cabinet Planning Board (企画院), and transferred to it the two services' administration of aircraft production. It comprised a General Mobilization Bureau, the Aircraft Ordnance General Bureau, and bureaus for machinery, iron and steel, light metals, non-ferrous metals, chemicals, fuel and electric power.

PM Tōjō Hideki served as first Minister of Munitions while simultaneously holding the posts of Prime Minister, War Minister, and (from February 1944) Chief of the Army General Staff, the peak of his concentration of power; Kishi Nobusuke, the former Commerce Minister, ran the ministry day to day as vice-minister with cabinet rank. The Aircraft Ordnance General Bureau was headed throughout by Lieutenant General Endō Saburō. The ministry administered the Munitions Companies Act (軍需会社法), under which private firms were designated state-directed munitions producers, their heads made "production supervisors" with a duty to produce, in return for priority in funds, materials and labour. About 150 firms were designated in January 1944 and the total eventually exceeded 600.

Under this system Japanese aircraft output peaked in 1944 at roughly 28,000 machines. But U.S. submarines and aircraft severed the sea lanes from the southern resource area, cutting imports of bauxite, oil and iron ore, and from late 1944 B-29 raids and the Tōnankai earthquake of December wrecked airframe and engine plants, while hurried dispersal of factories disrupted production further. After the Tōjō cabinet fell in July 1944 the ministers were Fujihara Ginjirō, Yoshida Shigeru (a former Home Ministry official, not the postwar prime minister) and Toyoda Teijirō.

After the surrender the last minister, Nakajima Chikuhei, founder of Nakajima Aircraft, took office on August 17, 1945. Vice-Minister Shiina Etsusaburō led the preemptive reversion to the Ministry of Commerce and Industry on August 26, 1945, forestalling GHQ-ordered dissolution. The Commerce Ministry was reorganized into MITI (1949) and then METI (2001); how far the personnel and methods of the wartime controlled economy shaped postwar industrial policy has long been debated by economic historians.