War reparations from China paid for Japan's second university in Kyoto
In the 1890s Japan had just one university, in Tokyo, and the government balked at funding another. Then Saionji Kinmochi, an aristocrat from an old Kyoto court family, proposed using reparations from the First Sino-Japanese War. Kyoto Imperial University opened in 1897 and now counts 21 Nobel laureates.
Its roots reach back to a chemistry school opened in Osaka in 1869, called Seimi-kyoku; seimi is a Japanese rendering of the Dutch word chemie. In 1894 that school was replaced by the Third Higher School, a boys' boarding academy. After an edict in 1896, the new university was founded on 18 June 1897 and moved into the higher school's buildings, while the school itself relocated across the street. The existing university in the capital was promptly renamed Tokyo Imperial University to tell them apart.
Teaching began with science and engineering, and a law college followed in 1898. When few of its law graduates passed the higher civil service exams, commercial law professor Yoshihito Takane adopted what he called the German approach of prizing freedom in research, teaching and study. He is credited with the phrase that became the university's motto, jiyu no gakufu, a free academic culture.
Post-war occupation reforms stripped the word imperial from its name in October 1947. In 1949 the old imperial universities absorbed higher schools and became four-year institutions, and Kyoto merged with the Third Higher School it had lived beside since founding; that school became a liberal arts college teaching first-year basics like maths and foreign languages. The same year the university acquired a former army site at Uji, now used for energy and natural science research, and in 2003 it opened the Katsura campus for engineering and informatics.
Two prime ministers, Fumimaro Konoe and Hayato Ikeda, studied there, and three more passed through the Third Higher School. Lee Teng-hui, later president of Taiwan, enrolled while Taiwan was a Japanese colony. Among its affiliates are Fields medallists Heisuke Hironaka and Shigefumi Mori, and eight of its Nobel laureates were undergraduates there. As of May 2023 it had 13,038 undergraduates and 9,577 graduate students, and its libraries hold over 7.49 million books, Japan's second-largest university collection.
Source: Kyoto University
