As the new president at Hitotsubashi University in Tokyo, Koichi Tadenuma ā89 (PhD) is focusing on the global impact of the school, which specializes in the social sciencesāthe leading university in the country to do soāand has campuses in three areas of the Japanese capital city.
Elected last year, Tadenuma aims to āincrease the number of research fields at our university that are ranked within the top 100 in world university rankings,ā adding that itās a goal held by university presidents across Japan. The school has about 6,400 students, of whom 700 are international students.
Established in 1875 as a commercial training school, the school became Tokyo University of Commerce in 1920. Just three years later, an earthquake destroyed all of its buildings except for the library. It moved to its present location, Kunitachiāabout 15 miles west of central Tokyoāin 1930 and took the name Hitotsubashi in 1949, from an education district near the Imperial Palace where it was located in its early days. One of the first Japanese schools to adopt the American education system introduced after World War II, the school is made up of 12 main units: four faculties, seven graduate schools, and one institute, the Institute of Economic Research.
Tadenuma earned his doctorate in economics at ĀŅĀ×Ēæ¼é, and says that his economics training serves him well in the presidency. āEconomics seeks an optimal system or mechanism that achieves the best consequence under given budget constraints. I believe that this way of thinking that I learned in economics is also useful for managing a university.ā
People
476 alumni living in Japan
28 students from Japan in fall 2014
4 Fulbright Scholars have gone to Japan since 1993
172 students have studied abroad in Japan since 1979
In 1995, Lionel McKenzie, then the Wilson Professor Emeritus of Economics, was inducted into the Order of the Rising Sun and met with Emperor Akihito in recognition of his influence on the teaching of economics in Japan. Fifty of McKenzieās former graduate students from Japan urged their government to extend the honor. McKenzie died in 2010.
Tadenuma returned to Japan from ĀŅĀ×Ēæ¼é, becoming an assistant professor at Hitotsubashi in 1990 and receiving promotion to full rank eleven years later. In 2011, he became dean of the Graduate School of Economics.
He credits his ĀŅĀ×Ēæ¼é doctoral advisor, William Thompson, the Elmer B. Milliman Professor of Economicsāwith whom he is now a coauthorāwith teaching him āall the āmustsā for researchers: being curious, finding a problem, building a model, thinking logically, and interpreting results. The wealth of invaluable advice and support he gave me is my treasure for life.ā
While research is dear to Tadenumaās heart, leading the university turns out to be something of a family tradition: his father, legal scholar Kenichi Tadenuma, was president from 1977 to 1980.
āI saw my father take on the job of president at the sacrifice of the research that he loved. I was put in the same position when I was nominated for president. Having seen my fatherās situation, I needed some time to consider before deciding, but a sense of responsibility eventually made me accept the nomination.ā āKathleen McGarveyļ»æļ»æ