Meisei University in Hino, a suburban town of Tokyo, Japan, traces its roots to the Meisei Jitsumu school, established in 1923, and was founded under its current name in 1964. Meisei denotes the planet Venus in Literary Chinese.
It opened with just one faculty, the Faculty of Physical Sciences and Engineering. Today, there are several further faculties, including in Humanities and Social Sciences, Economics, Japanese Culture and Informatics.
There are two campuses: the Hino campus and the Ome campus, both in the western part of Tokyo. The Hino campus has four faculties over 270,000m² and the Ome campus has two faculties over 820,000m².
The university follows three educational aims: to provide education which carefully nurtures students by personality contact; to provide education which improves the power of the mind by concentrating the mind’s effort on thinking; and to provide practical education which encourages students to carry out and achieve goals through practical cooperation with society.
This last aim is the origin of the School of Education. This school includes an internship programme. Students of any school at Meisei have the option to obtain a teaching qualification.
Facilities include an astronomical observation dome, a performing arts theatre known as Shakespeare Hall and modelled after London’s original Globe Theatre.
Iwaki Meisei University in the Fukushima Prefecture, north of Tokyo, was opened in 1987 as a brother university to Meisei university.
Meisei is one of the first higher education institutions in Japan to offer postgraduate distance education.
Notable alumni include Japanese manga artist Naoki Urasawa.
