Founding of University of Tokyo

The University of Tokyo is the oldest of Japan's national universities and has long been regarded as the country's most prestigious. It was established during the Meiji era by merging earlier institutions, including a school of Western studies and a medical school, as part of the government's drive to modernize Japan through education. The new university employed many foreign teachers and trained generations of bureaucrats, scientists, engineers and politicians. Its graduates have included prime ministers and Nobel Prize winners. The university occupies a main campus at Hongo in central Tokyo, on land that was once the estate of the Maeda family of Kaga, with other campuses at Komaba and Kashiwa.

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