MWU is a private institution founded as a girls’ high school in 1939 in Nishinomiya, Hyogo Prefecture, a city located between the major centres of Kobe and Osaka.
The university, which proclaims the purpose of "nurturing women to develop a combination of high intelligence, noble sentiment, and lofty virtues, and to become constructive members of a peaceful nation and society," was created 10 years later and in the 1980s was extended to include a co-educational Graduate School which offered doctoral programmes from 1989. It also incorporates nursery, kindergarten and middle schools as well as the original high school.
As it approached its 80th anniversary in 2019, it was described by its president as “Japan’s foremost women’s university in terms of standards of education and research, educational environment and organisational scale”, with more than 10,000 students.
Recent developments include the creation of schools of health and sports science in 2015 and nursing in 2017. Its research centres cover such varied themes as aesthetics in everyday life, world health development and Turkish cultural studies.
New buildings were constructed for the departments of psychological science in 2011 and nutritional science, one of the university’s strongest areas of research, in 2012. The school of architecture is located in Koshien Hall, a former hotel designed in 1930 by one of Frank Lloyd Wright’s leading Japanese students.
Since 1990 it has had an international branch based at Fort Wright, Spokane, Washington – Nishinomiya’s twin city since 1961. Starting with 110 students, it grew to teach more than 12,000 in its first 25 years of operation.
