"The Ministry of Home Affairs: The Giant Bureaucracy That Ruled Modern Japan" (Edited by the Ministry of Home Affairs Research Group)

"The Ministry of Home Affairs Research Group?" When information about the publication of this book was released, various speculations about this strange name flew across the internet. In addition to the rarity of the authors being a group, they were researching the Ministry of Home Affairs, a department with a mixed reputation. It is certainly strange. Let me explain a little bit here.

In January 2001, before entering my doctoral program, I was troubled. At that time, the Japanese political history program at Keio's Graduate School of Law was a blessed environment with three faculty members and many graduate students, but within that, I was struggling to grow and felt stuck.

However, this issue is not shared among many Japanese people. While there is discourse that education is a noble and important endeavor, the percentage of Japanese people who want an increase in public education spending is low by international standards. People who receive an education certainly enjoy the benefits, but the spread of education also brings benefits to society as a whole. However, the latter is not well recognized. Educational scholars have also neglected efforts to empirically demonstrate the public benefits of education.

At that time, I heard that two interesting graduate students from other universities had come to the Graduate School of Economics. Thinking this was my chance, I waited for them outside the classroom to talk, and later, the three of us held a small presentation of our master's theses. I felt as if a new horizon was opening up.

I wanted to start an intercollegiate study group by inviting wider participation. With the help of acquaintances, eight people gathered from Keio, the University of Tokyo, and Gakushuin. Masamichi Ogawara from the Faculty of Law and Yusaku Matsuzawa from the Faculty of Economics (then at the University of Tokyo) were there from the start, and Hiroki Kashiwabara, who was appointed to the Faculty of Law this spring, was also an early member.

This was a time when academic clique consciousness still remained. Partly to deflect slanders like "young people are gathering to engage in suspicious activities," we thought about a theme for the group. Looking across the members' specialties, they included shrine administration, local administration, health administration, exhibitions, and political-bureaucratic relations. We realized there was a government office that encompassed all of these, and so we came to call ourselves the Ministry of Home Affairs Research Group. A quarter-century has passed since then. Despite the name, the group has moved forward at a gentle pace, meeting once every three months as a group that handles modern and contemporary Japanese history broadly. Before the 20th anniversary, the organizers changed, and the new organizers weathered the COVID-19 pandemic, with the meetings now exceeding 100 sessions.

In the milestone 25th year, I was invited to write about the "Ministry of Home Affairs." Although it was an inquiry to me personally, I wanted to take it on as a research group, and everyone agreed. Two and a half years have passed since then. We have successfully reached publication.

In this way, 25 people wrote about the giant bureaucracy that symbolized pre-war Japan, consisting of an introduction, four chronological sections, ten thematic histories, and eleven columns. As a comprehensive work, it is the first in half a century since the "History of the Ministry of Home Affairs" compiled by former officials. It is a thick paperback, but I hope you enjoy it from various angles.

"The Ministry of Home Affairs: The Giant Bureaucracy That Ruled Modern Japan"

(Edited by the Ministry of Home Affairs Research Group)

Yuichiro Shimizu

Kodansha Gendai Shinsho

560 pages, 1,650 yen (tax included)