Sophia University, Tokyo

Sophia-Universität, Tokyo IMG

The establishment of the Roman Catholic Sophia University in Tokyo took place at the request of Pope Pius X (1835–1914). Starting in 1908, three Jesuits, Joseph Dahlmann (1861–1930), Henri Boucher (1857–1939) and James Rockliff (1852–1926), initiated the founding of the university, which opened in 1913. Sophia is now considered an elite private university.

St. Ignatius of Loyola Church, in front of Sophia University building, 2013, photograph: John Paul Antes; source: Wikimedia Commons, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported (CC BY-SA 3.0), https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en.