Biography|Hiroya Masuda — The Hongo Gate That Sent Him Into the Construction Ministry

Most Japanese cabinet biographies treat the University of Tokyo as a line on a CV.

For Hiroya Masuda the Hongo campus is the place the line was drawn.

He was born in Setagaya on 20 December 1951, the son of Sakari Masuda, an agriculture bureaucrat who later sat in the House of Councillors.

He finished Tokyo Metropolitan Toyama High School in March 1970, entered the Faculty of Law, and took the national public-service upper exam while still a student.

In March 1977 he graduated from the private-law course, Faculty of Law, University of Tokyo.

The next month he joined the Ministry of Construction.

The red Akamon on Hongo-dori is the public door of that campus.

It is not the lecture room, and the faculty buildings behind it have been rebuilt more than once since the 1970s.

It is still the gate a visitor can stand in front of and know that this is where a Tokyo-born law student chose the construction bureaucracy over a private firm or a courtroom.

That choice is what later made him usable in Iwate.

A ministry man who had already been posted to Chiba prefectural police traffic enforcement in 1982, to Ibaraki railway planning in 1986, and back to the River Bureau and the Construction Industry Division in the mid-1990s could campaign in Morioka as someone who knew how national public works actually moved.

He resigned from the ministry in December 1994 to run.

The Hongo degree was the ticket that got him through the ministry door.

The ministry years were the apprenticeship that made the governorship plausible.

Stand at the Akamon and the later titles — governor, interior minister, Japan Post chief — look less like a jump and more like a single track that started here.

Photo: Cabinet Public Relations Office, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Gate: historical view of the Akamon, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.