The 1923 earthquake wrecked Tokyo's university and rebuilt it as a seismology leader
On 1 September 1923 the Great Kanto Earthquake destroyed nearly every main building of the University of Tokyo, including its library and irreplaceable scientific and historical collections. The League of Nations pledged help, John D. Rockefeller Jr. gave $2 million, and within two years the university had founded its Earthquake Research Institute.
The university drew together schools from the shogun's era. The oldest was a Confucian academy founded by Razan Hayashi in 1630, later run directly by the shogunate as the Shoheizaka Institute. The Tenmongata, the shogunate's astronomy office from 1684, became a school of Western learning after the Meiji Restoration, and a vaccination centre opened in 1858 grew into a medical school. The Meiji government chartered the merged university on 12 April 1877 with faculties of law, science, letters and medicine, and by 1888 all had moved onto the former Hongo estate of the Maeda clan, whose red Akamon gate is now the university's emblem.
Early teaching leaned on foreign lecturers and English, but by the 1880s the education minister, wary of foreign political ideas, pushed instruction into Japanese as graduates returned from Europe to take over. In the interwar years its law professors shaped liberal Taisho Democracy, and alumnus prime minister Takaaki Kato extended the vote to all men aged 25 and over in 1925.
After the quake, plans to relocate were rejected in favour of buying neighbouring Maeda land. Many buildings on Hongo today date from that rebuilding, in a style named Uchida Gothic after architect Yoshikazu Uchida, who later, as president in 1945, talked the army out of turning the campus into a fortress. The Second World War killed 1,652 students and alumni. The university admitted its first nineteen women in April 1946, and dropped Imperial from its name in 1947.
Protests in 1968 over unpaid medical internships escalated until radical students occupied Yasuda Auditorium; in January 1969 more than 8,500 riot police cleared them, and Prime Minister Eisaku Sato, himself a graduate, cancelled that year's admissions. Alumni include 17 prime ministers and 20 Nobel laureates, and in 2023 women made up 23% of first-year undergraduates, a record.
Source: University of Tokyo
