Tama University can be characterized as a "contemporary tutoring school."
It is a place where teachers and students - or just the students themselves - "communicate" their burning ambitions. It is also a place where new ideas are created. Tama University has left the former lecture-oriented, or unidirectional knowledge-transmitting, university behind, aiming to instead be a dialog-based, "contemporary tutoring school" emphasizing the importance of the holistic growth of its students.

Tumultuous End of the Edo Period

At the end of the Edo Period (1603 – 1867), when Japan was experiencing great changes, many "tutoring schools" were founded which later produced many ambitious and talented young men. Some of the more famous of these schools, such as Tekijuku and Kangien, produced such prominent figures as Fukuzawa Yukichi and Oomura Masujiro. Originally there was only one tutoring school, which operated for only one year but produced many talented men who changed history. The name of this original school was Shokasonjuku, led by Yoshida Shoin. The students who learned from him came to earnestly believe in, and insist on, reform while learning about Shoin's own burning ambitions and way of life as they lived together.

Shokasonjuku was a small school with three rooms of eight tatami mats in size., and there students would study into the night. It was Shoin’s goal was to have students realize their own individual strengths, and to this end he promoted ways of thinking through "dialog" instead of transmitting knowledge from an elevated position.

Thus, what Shoin did was was to actually “educe” rather than educate. Moreover, Shoin never failed to ask his students the following questions: Why did you want to join the school? Why did you decided to go into academics? What do you want to study? What do you plan to do in the future? He knew rightly that having ambition and realizing what one needs to do in life were essential to education. Young supporters who inherited Shoin's strong ambition eventually initiated the Meiji Period in Japan.

Today...

Today Japan is just as tumultuous as it was at the end of the Edo period. While universities face such criticisms as transmitting unidirectional knowledge, being ivory towers, and being closed, Tama University is unique in that we are "open" to society and place importance on "dialog." Tama University, founded at the dawn of the Heisei Period (1989 - ), is a small university with a total student body of 1,530 and 38 faculty members. It has one undergraduate faculty (Management and Information Sciences) and one part-time graduate program.

By merging two academic fields, management and information sciences, we have established a new academic discipline for the 21st century that promotes the education of human business resources that can act globally.

In order to realize these objectives, we have developed "handmade education tightly linked with industry." For this reason, we have strived to create an "open knowledge university," i.e., a university that is open to the real world instead of being cut off from society. For example, half of our faculty consists of professionals from various industries that regularly conduct practical lectures and seminars that introduce the students to the latest trends of their respective industries.
In addition, we have instituted a no-cancellation policy that strictly bans faculty members from canceling classes for personal reasons.

Our goal is to realize a "contemporary tutoring school" that emphasizes the importance of an education style through which students can better realize their true selves as a result of contemplating questions such as "Why did I come to university?" "How should I lead my life from now on?" and "How should I understand the relationship between society and myself?" This process ultimately leads to self-discovery.