Biography|Hiroya Masuda — A Governor Walked Into This Cabinet as Interior Minister

On 27 August 2007 Shinzo Abe reshuffled his cabinet at the Prime Minister's Official Residence in Nagatacho.

The official English readout from the Kantei named Hiroya Masuda, four months out of the Iwate governorship, as Minister for Internal Affairs and Communications.

Abe told the press that day that a former governor was the person he wanted on regional revitalization.

The Kantei that hosted the announcement is the 2002 office building at 2-3-1 Nagatacho, not the older official residence next to it.

Cabinet group photographs from the same week show Masuda in the ministerial lineup inside these rooms.

He kept the portfolio through the end of the Abe cabinet and through Yasuo Fukuda's cabinets, and left when Taro Aso formed a government on 24 September 2008.

The job was not ceremonial.

Internal Affairs oversees local government finance, the radio spectrum, and — still raw after Koizumi — the politics of postal privatization.

Masuda had already spent twelve years on the receiving end of Tokyo's grants.

Putting him in this building was a bet that a prefectural executive could translate rural anger after the 2007 upper-house defeat into something the cabinet could use.

He did not become a faction politician.

He remained a civilian minister, which is why later governments kept calling him back as chair of the postal privatization committee from 2013 to 2016, and why Japan Post Holdings reached for him in 2019.

The Kantei is a working building, not a museum.

A visitor sees the east facade from the street and cannot walk the cabinet rooms.

The date that belongs here is the day the governor from Morioka became a minister of state.

Photo: Cabinet Public Relations Office portrait of Masuda, August 2007, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Building: Prime Minister's Official Residence, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.