PRESIDENTIAL PERFORMANCE: Tadenuma, an economist, is the new president of Hitotsubashi University, Japan’s leading university to specialize in the social sciences. (Photo: Hitotsubashi University)

As the new president at Hitotsubashi University in Tokyo, Koichi Tadenuma ’89 (PhD) is focusing on the global impact of the school, which specializes in the social sciences—the leading university in the country to do so—and has campuses in three areas of the Japanese capital city.

Elected last year, Tadenuma aims to “increase the number of research fields at our university that are ranked within the top 100 in world university rankings,” adding that it’s 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, Kunitachi—about 15 miles west of central Tokyo—in 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 Rochester, and says that his economics training serves him well in the presidency. “Economics 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.”