Meiji University Liberty Tower & Museum: The Citadel of Law

Why is it significant?

Gaze upward at the soaring twenty-three-story profile of Liberty Tower, the monumental flagship campus building of Meiji University.

Key Facts

Open the walk

Gaze upward at the soaring twenty-three-story profile of Liberty Tower, the monumental flagship campus building of Meiji University. Rising one hundred and nineteen meters above the Surugadai ridge, this grand skyscraper university was completed in nineteen ninety-eight to symbolize academic freedom and modern democratic progress. Founded in eighteen eighty-one by three idealistic young samurai jurists during the Meiji legal enlightenment, Meiji University was Japan's first modern private law school, educating generations of prime ministers, judges, and civic leaders.

Head down to the basement levels to discover the Meiji University Museum, one of Tokyo's most fascinating and unusual free museums. The museum features three distinct wings: a department of legal history, a department of traditional handicrafts, and an archaeological department displaying prehistoric stone tools, clay figurines, and pottery excavated from ancient Jomon and Yayoi settlements across Japan. The university's legal history collections serve as a permanent educational monument to human rights and civil liberties. The university's legal history collections serve as a permanent educational monument to human rights and civil liberties.

The Department of Criminal Materials holds historical artifacts found nowhere else in Asia: here you can view ancient Japanese Edo-period torture implements, interrogation batons, and wooden restraint cages used to enforce shogunate law, alongside historical European execution devices including an an authentic replica of an eighteenth-century French guillotine and the infamous Iron Maiden of Nuremberg, demonstrating historical penal systems from around the globe. Students and international scholars gather in the campus plaza to discuss social philosophy, human rights, and global governance. Students and international scholars gather in the campus plaza to discuss social philosophy, human rights, and global governance.

The university founders established this criminal justice collection not to glorify punishment, but to teach future judges and human rights lawyers the vital necessity of the rule of law, fair trials, and the total abolition of cruel and unusual punishment in civilized democratic societies, preserving justice through constitutional law.

Walk south down the hill toward the bustling crossroads of Yasukuni-dori into the literary corridors of Jimbocho.