On September 28, 2026, Fujigaki Yuko was selected as the next president of the University of Tokyo. Following formal appointment by the minister of education, culture, sports, science, and technology, she will take office on April 1, 2027, for a six-year term.

As the university marks its 150th anniversary, Fujigaki will become the first woman to lead it. Yet at the institution she is about to head, only about one in five undergraduates is a woman.

Fujigaki is not Japan’s first female university president. In 1997, Niwa Masako became president of Nara Women’s University, the first woman to head a national university in Japan, and in 2001, Honda Masuko became the first female president of Ochanomizu University. Coeducational national universities also have earlier precedents: Ikehata Setsuho became the first female president of Tokyo University of Foreign Studies in 2001, and Kina Ikue became the first female president of the University of the Ryukyus in 2025. 

Even so, the appointment of a woman to lead the University of Tokyo, often seen as Japan’s most prominent university and an institution with considerable social influence, carries particular symbolic weight.

The Selection Process

Fujigaki, 64, is a professor at the University of Tokyo’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, specializing in science and technology studies and scientometrics. She earned her bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees at the same university, completing her doctorate in 1990. Apart from nearly four years as a senior researcher at the government’s National Institute of Science and Technology Policy, she has spent her career at the university, becoming a professor in 2010. Starting in 2021, she served for five years as an executive vice president, overseeing areas including admissions, student support, and research ethics.

Her selection has nevertheless generated controversy both inside and outside the university. Most notably, Fujigaki did not receive the most votes in the university’s opinion vote. On September 28, eligible faculty and administrative staff took part in two rounds of voting, with the top three candidates in the first round advancing to the second. The vote was intended only as one source of information for the selection process and did not directly determine the final choice.

In the first round, Someya Takao, a professor at the Graduate School of Engineering, received 818 votes, or 38.0 percent of the 2,155 ballots cast, including blank ballots. Fujigaki received 400 votes, or 18.6 percent. In the second round, Someya received 1,107 votes, or 51.0 percent of the 2,169 ballots cast, while Fujigaki received 553, or 25.5 percent. Fujigaki therefore finished second in both rounds, with less than half as many votes as Someya. According to The Todai Shimbun, this appears to be the first time under the university’s established presidential selection system that a candidate who did not finish first in the opinion vote was ultimately chosen.

The final decision rested with the University President Screening & Inspection Committee. Half of its 16 members are chosen by the university’s Education and Research Council and include senior officials such as graduate school deans; the other half are external members of the university’s Administrative Council, with backgrounds in business, media, and other fields. Kuniya Hiroko, who chairs the committee, is a trustee of Tokyo University of the Arts and anchored NHK’s current affairs program “Close-up Gendai” for many years. The committee considers candidates’ policy statements, interviews, the opinion vote, and other materials before making its final decision.

Selecting the second-place candidate therefore did not violate the university’s procedures. But the committee’s authority to make the final decision does not eliminate the need to explain the gap between the vote and the eventual outcome. When one candidate receives majority support from participating faculty and staff but another is selected as president, members of the university can reasonably ask how much weight was given to the various criteria, what strengths outweighed the vote, and ultimately how much significance the university still attaches to its long-standing internal ballot.

In its statement, the committee said that through her experience as an executive vice president, Fujigaki had become keenly aware of the university’s role as a symbol of academia, and that she had the strong will and ability to restore trust in academia, drawing on her skill in communicating science and technology to the public. It also said that, drawing on her extensive international experience, Fujigaki had the ability to make the university more open by integrating the arts and sciences and strengthening communication within and beyond the university.

The committee’s reference to “restoring trust” has a clear context. In November 2025 and January 2026, an associate professor and a professor at the University of Tokyo Medical School Hospital were arrested on suspicion of bribery. The associate professor was accused of favoring a medical device company in procurement decisions and receiving roughly 700,000 yen (around $4,400) through a donation arrangement. The professor was accused of repeatedly accepting expensive entertainment, including at upscale clubs, from the head of an organization that had partnered with the university on a collaborative program. The university apologized, and the hospital director subsequently resigned.

At the same time, the University of Tokyo’s application to be designated a University for International Research Excellence, a status that would give it access to grants from the government’s University Fund, has remained under continued review since December 2025. The Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology said the university still needed to clarify how it allocates resources and strengthen its institution-wide governance. Restoring trust and advancing governance reform are therefore important challenges for the next president.

The Controversy 

Kuniya also said at the press conference that gender had not been a subject of discussion during the committee’s deliberations. 

It is important to distinguish questions about the transparency of the process from arguments about Fujigaki’s gender. Questioning how the selection was made does not amount to opposition to female leadership. Nor, in the absence of evidence, should the outcome simply be attributed to a preference for appointing a woman. Supporting more women in leadership and asking a university to explain a major personnel decision are not contradictory positions. 

At the same time, debates of this kind can reflect the unusually demanding standards sometimes applied to female leaders, making it important to remain alert to gender-based double standards.

Some critics have also compared Fujigaki’s academic record unfavorably with Someya’s. Japanese internet personality Nishimura Hiroyuki, for example, amplified claims on X that Someya’s papers had received roughly 70 times as many citations as Fujigaki’s. 

Someya is an engineer specializing in flexible electronics. His best-known work includes ultrathin electronic devices that can be attached directly to the skin. He has received numerous academic honors, including the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science Prize in 2008, the Leo Esaki Prize in 2019, and the Fujiwara Prize in 2024, and has repeatedly appeared on Clarivate’s list of Highly Cited Researchers. Fujigaki, by contrast, mainly uses approaches from the humanities and social sciences to examine the relationship between science, technology, and society. 

Publication practices, research team size, language of publication, and citation patterns differ greatly across disciplines. Simply comparing total citation counts or numbers of awards therefore offers only a limited basis for judging the academic achievements of two scholars in different fields. 

More importantly, a university president is responsible not only for research but also for educational and research administration, organizational coordination, resource allocation, and public communication. Academic achievement is only one part of the selection criteria.

Japan’s Remaining Gender Gap

There is a broader context to the debate. Even as the University of Tokyo  prepares to install its first female president, the gender imbalance among its students remains pronounced. As of May 1, 2026, the university had 14,098 undergraduate students, of whom 3,023 were women – just 21.4 percent.

Across Japan, more than half of women now go on to university, but the overall figure conceals substantial inequalities between fields of study and stages of education. In 2025, 56.5 percent of women and 60.7 percent of men advanced to undergraduate programs, a gap of 4.2 percentage points. The gap becomes much wider at the graduate level: only 6.9 percent of female university graduates went directly on to graduate school, compared with 16.0 percent of men.

Differences by field are equally striking. In 2025, women accounted for 29.4 percent of undergraduates in science and just 17.9 percent in engineering. At the master’s level, their shares fell further, to 24.0 percent and 15.9 percent, respectively. The fact that more women are entering higher education does not mean that they participate equally across academic disciplines.

Women remain underrepresented at senior levels after entering academia as well. In 2025, women accounted for 28.2 percent of full-time faculty at Japanese universities and graduate schools, but only 20.1 percent of presidents, vice presidents, and professors. In 2024, just four of the 86 presidents of Japan’s national universities were women, or 4.7 percent, compared with 14.9 percent at public universities and 15.1 percent at private universities.

The same pattern is evident in corporate management. In 2025, women made up 16.1 percent of section managers and 9.3 percent of department managers at companies with at least 100 regular employees. As of October 2025, women headed only 8.6 percent of Japanese companies. Although this was a record high, the figure remained below one in ten.

Politics shows a similar imbalance. Takaichi Sanae became Japan’s first female prime minister in October 2025. Yet after Takaichi’s September 2026 Cabinet reshuffle, only three of the 19 Cabinet members, including the prime minister herself, were women. As of February 2026, women accounted for 30.0 percent of members of the House of Councillors but only 14.6 percent of members of the House of Representatives. These gaps show that women’s expanding access to higher education has not yet translated fully into representation in leadership and decision-making positions.

The appointment of the University of Tokyo’s first female president is symbolically important, but substantive progress will depend on what universities do to support women at different stages of their education and careers. That means encouraging women to continue into graduate education, supporting their participation in science and engineering, and creating classrooms in which they feel comfortable expressing their views and taking part in discussion. 

For researchers, it means reducing gender discrimination in the workplace, ensuring fair and transparent recruitment and promotion, and making it easier to combine research careers with caregiving responsibilities. Together, these measures can give women greater opportunities to develop their abilities and participate in decision-making, not only in academia but also in business and society more broadly.