Books I've read, am reading, and will read (April 2026)

Why was the 'Home Ministry' considered necessary?

Here are my initial thoughts on the Introduction: Between Politics and Administration (Yuichiro Shimizu) from the book 'The Home Ministry: The Giant Bureaucracy That Ruled Modern Japan' (Kodansha Gendai Shinsho), edited by the Home Ministry Research Group.

The Home Ministry was born in November 1873. It was not merely the establishment of a new government office, but the result of a choice regarding 'where to focus the power' of the Meiji state.

What Shimizu emphasizes first is the national strategy of prioritizing internal administration that lay behind the creation of the Home Ministry. Rather than diplomacy or military affairs, the focus was on organizing domestic order and the economic foundation through three areas: industrial promotion, local administration, and police. The Home Ministry was conceived as an institutional device to advance modernization 'from within'.

What is interesting is that this new establishment of the Home Ministry is positioned not as a simple administrative reorganization, but as a shift toward active fiscal policy to counter the austerity-driven fiscal management led by the Ministry of Finance point. Amidst tightening fiscal constraints, the Home Ministry was born as an 'office for spending (the budget).' It is clear that in the early stages of modern state formation, the administrative structure itself embodied the conflict in fiscal philosophy.

Later, as the importance of industrial promotion administration grew and the Ministry of Agriculture and Commerce became independent, the Home Ministry formally relinquished some of its major policy areas. However, Shimizu does not view this as a simple reduction of authority. The Home Minister's countersignature remained on many policies, and substantial influence continued to be maintained.

What emerges here is the gap between 'jurisdiction' and 'actual power' in the Japanese bureaucracy. The persistence of influence and institutional inertia, which cannot be grasped by organizational charts alone, make the existence of the Home Ministry unique.

Furthermore, the introduction points out that the Home Ministry was frequently placed in 'joint jurisdiction' relationships with other ministries, and as a result, faced chronic difficulties in coordination. River administration, railways and tracks, local tax and finance—all are fields directly linked to the foundation of the state, and conflicts between ministries inevitably arose there.

What emerges from this description is not the image of the Home Ministry as an omnipotent agency, but rather as an agency that was consistently placed at the center of friction.

What I feel from the introduction is that the history of the Home Ministry is not just a 'history of the rise and fall of a powerful agency.' It already condenses the fundamental problems of Japanese administration that are still relevant today, such as conflicts in fiscal philosophy, the reorganization of administrative domains, the divergence between institutions and actual power, and inter-ministerial coordination.

This introduction asks 'What was the Home Ministry?' while simultaneously quietly posing the larger question of 'How has the modern Japanese state been governed?'

The introduction alone is worth reading.

to be continued