The University of Tokyo's origins reach back further than 1877. One predecessor, the Shohei-zaka Institute, was a Confucian academy that the Tokugawa Shogunate took over in 1791. Another, the Tenmongata, served as the shogunate's astronomical research arm beginning in 1684. A third, the Kanda Otamagaike Vaccination Centre founded in 1858, evolved into a school of Western medicine. When the Meiji government toppled the shogunate and set about transforming Japan into a modern nation-state, it merged these schools into one university with four faculties: Law, Science, Letters, and Medicine. Engineering followed when the Imperial College of Engineering was absorbed. By 1888, all faculties had relocated to the former Maeda estate in Hongo. The decision on what to learn and from whom was deliberate: engineering from Britain, mathematics and physics from France, politics and medicine from Germany, agriculture from the United States. Japan was building a university -- and through it, a nation -- by selectively borrowing from the entire Western world.

On September 1, 1923, the Great Kanto Earthquake destroyed almost every main building on the Hongo Campus, including the library and irreplaceable scientific collections. The League of Nations took up the university's reconstruction at its general assembly that month, sympathetic in part because the destruction of KU Leuven during World War I remained a fresh memory. John D. Rockefeller Jr. personally donated two million dollars -- roughly thirty-six million in today's terms. Britain formed a committee led by former Prime Minister Arthur Balfour. When the campus rose again, it did so in a distinctive Collegiate Gothic style designed by architect Yoshikazu Uchida, now known simply as Uchida Gothic. Yasuda Auditorium and the General Library, both completed by 1929, became the campus's visual signature. The earthquake also spurred the university's seismology program: an independent department was created in November 1923, and in 1925 the Earthquake Research Institute was established, operating continuously ever since.

The university's research output has punctuated Japanese history at regular intervals. In 1904, physicist Hantaro Nagaoka proposed a Saturnian model of the atom that influenced Rutherford's later work. In 1951, doctoral student Kiyoshi Ito pioneered stochastic calculus, mathematics that would eventually underpin modern financial option pricing through the Black-Scholes equation. On February 11, 1970, a team at the university's Institute of Space and Aeronautical Science launched Ohsumi, Japan's first satellite, making the country the fourth nation capable of orbital launch using its own vehicles. That institute eventually evolved into JAXA, Japan's space agency. On February 23, 1987, the Kamioka Nucleon Decay Experiment -- part of the physics department -- detected cosmic neutrinos for the first time, earning Masatoshi Koshiba the 2002 Nobel Prize in Physics. The successor experiment, Super-Kamiokande, proved neutrinos have mass, winning Takaaki Kajita the 2015 Nobel. Hyper-Kamiokande, the next generation, is under construction with operations planned for 2027.

The university's influence on Japanese governance is extraordinary. Seventeen prime ministers attended the university, most of them studying law at the Faculty of Law, which has functioned as something close to a national leadership academy. As of 2023, UTokyo alumni held 139 of the 713 seats in the National Diet -- roughly a fifth of the national legislature. Eleven of the fifteen sitting Supreme Court justices are alumni. All four Japanese judges to serve on the International Court of Justice studied here. Beyond government, the university's alumni founded Toyota, Nissan's parent zaibatsu, and Recruit Holdings. More than half of the governors of the Bank of Japan have been UTokyo graduates. Twenty Nobel laureates count the university among their affiliations, along with Pritzker Prize architects Kenzo Tange, Arata Isozaki, Toyo Ito, and Fumihiko Maki. And Jigoro Kano, who graduated in 1882, invented judo -- now an Olympic sport practiced worldwide.

The Hongo Campus, the university's center since 1884, occupies what was once the Maeda family's Edo-period estate. The Red Gate -- Akamon -- remains from that era, a vermilion relic among Uchida Gothic towers. Ginkgo trees line the main avenues, and their leaf has become the university's symbol. Shinobazu Pond in Ueno Park borders the campus to the east, while the electronics district of Akihabara and the bookshop quarter of Jimbocho lie nearby. The campus itself is a small city: fifteen dining halls, nine cafes, nine convenience stores, a bookshop, two barbershops, and an underground gym with two 25-meter swimming pools. The university's total landholdings across Japan amount to 326 square kilometers, making it one of the largest landowners in the country -- a sprawling intellectual empire that still pivots around the feudal lord's gate where it began.