ministry · Japan
Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare (厚生労働省)
Japan's national ministry responsible for health, medical and welfare policy. It issues and administers the national medical and dental licences and sets national medical-care policy; physicians and dentists are licensed at ministry level rather than through a separate professional council. Its official physician-search service (licenseif.mhlw.go.jp) is a non-UTF-8 (Windows-31J / Shift-JIS) frameset that is not reliably machine-readable, so no practitioner lookup URL is provided here.
Scope of authority
Ministry-level regulation of medicine and dentistry in Japan, including national licensing of physicians and dentists and administration of the Medical Care Act; individual medical-facility licensing is carried out by prefectural governors under that Act.