Dokkyo University

The name "Dokkyo" is the Japanese-style dual kanji-based abbreviation of Verein für deutsche Wissenschaften, or German Studies Society (獨逸學協會 Doitsu-gaku Kyōkai?). What was to become today's Dokkyo University was founded on 18 September 1881 by those scholars such as Nishi Amane and Katō Hiroyuki, diplomats such as Inoue Kaoru and Aoki Shūzō and statesmen such as Shinagawa Yajirō and Katsura Tarō as Verein für deutsche Wissenschaften, or German Studies Society (獨逸學協會 Doitsu-gaku Kyōkai?), with its first chancellor being Prince Kitashirakawa Yoshihisa. It developed into Schule des Vereins für deutsche Wissenschaften, or German Studies Society School (獨逸學協會學校 Doitsu-gaku Kyōkai Gakkō?) in 1883, which opened its doors exclusively to boys in line with the custom at the time. They also founded a highly prestigious law school to study Japan's first constitution The Constitution of the Great Empire of Japan, modeled after the Prussian one with criminal codes also modeled after the German ones, but the elite law division was absorbed by the Imperial University of Tokyo Faculty of Law in 1895. The school went through a minor negative campaign due to World War I, when Japan sided with the British Empire against the German Empire from August 1914 to November 1918, but the majority of the Japanese public was either pro-German or neutral despite Japan's position in the Anglo-Japanese Alliance. The 1920s saw its heyday when the school sent the highest number of boys into the nation's top Daiichi Kōtō Gakkō (第一高等学校 Daiichi Kōtō Gakkō?) ("High School No.1") in Tokyo, or popularly known as "Ichikō", which is today's Liberal Arts campus of the University of Tokyo. The collapse of the two great empires of Germany and Japan in 1945, however, rendered the elite school into a mere boys' high school of middle rank. During the early 1960s Dokkyo School's graduate and former Education Minister Amano Teiyū (天野貞祐 Amano Teiyū?) was invited to "found" the University with money from the school and local governments. They started their first lectures on a higher education level in April 1964.