The agency is charged with supervising firefighting efforts as well as project planning, ordinance enforcement, and establishing standards and policies regarding fire fighting.

The agency does not handle the actual fire fighting, direct management, or day-to-day activities of the individual municipal departments, but they own and maintain the fire engines, helicopters, and other support vehicles used by the various departments nationwide.

There are prefectural FDMA offices throughout Japan to help handle any natural disasters, terroristic attacks, and the like.

Some of its structure since 2003 is modeled after the Federal Emergency Management Agency in the United States.

It was established to provide a unified way of approaching and handling any sort of disaster.