University of Tomorrow

As the Japanese Treaty went into effect, new tenants took up residence last week on the old Tokyo property of the Nakajima Aircraft Co., which turned out fighters during World War II. Seventy-five students (including 17 women) and a 15-man faculty (mostly Americans) began the first classes at Japan's International Christian University.

I.C.U. has been a longtime dream of Japanese Protestants and foreign missionaries. Japan has 37 Christian colleges and universities, but few of them have the resources to compete with the big private or state universities, which are aggressively secular.

After World War II, the National Council of Churches in the U.S. sponsored a plan to raise $10,000,000 for a new university, with an international Christian faculty, which could pump some Christianity into Japanese education on a graduate as well as an undergraduate level. U.S. Protestants have so far raised more than $2,000,000; Japanese donors (95% of them nonChristian) have given 160,-000,000 yen ($450,000).

The Emperor's sister-in-law, Princess Chichibu, and 200 other Japanese and foreign dignitaries attended I.C.U.'s formal dedication ceremonies. Said I.C.U.'s first president, Zoologist Hachiro Yuasa, a third-generation Japanese Christian: "International Christian University is fundamentally a university of tomorrow . . . born out of the tragedies of war and dedicated to the proposition that truth and truth alone shall make men and nations free." Requirements for faculty members, as set by President Yuasa: firm scholarship and "dynamic" Christianity.

Currently, I.C.U.'s curriculum is restricted to an intensive one-year course in English. "Tomorrow" will begin next April, when the first regular divisions will open, a graduate school of education and an undergraduate liberal-arts college.

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