Yokohama National University (横浜国立大学, Yokohama Kokuritsu Daigaku?), or Yokokoku (横国?) is a national university in Hodogaya-ku, Yokohama, Kanagawa Prefecture, Japan. It offers Doctoral degrees in education as part of a coalition with Tokyo Gakugei University, Saitama University, and Chiba University. It is noted for its Business Administration program.
The predecessor of the school was founded in 1876. It became a Japanese national university in 1949 by the amalgamation of Kanagawa Normal School, Kanagawa Youth Normal School, Yokohama College of Economics and the Yokohama Institute of Technology. The Faculty of Business Administration was founded in 1967. The university has Master's Degree Programs in Engineering (1962), Economics (1972), Business Administration (1972), and Education (1979). The Institute of Environmental Science and Technology was established in 1973 under the botanist Akira Miyawaki, and the Graduate School of International and Business Law was established in 1990. The Graduate School of International Development Studies was created in 1994 and the School of Law in 2004. Alumni include film director Shunji Iwai, photographer Akira Satō, game designers Hiromichi Tanaka and Hironobu Sakaguchi and Koshi Inaba, lead singer of the rock duo B'z.
Yokohama (横浜市, Yokohama-shi?, "Side Shore") ( listen (help·info)) is the capital city of Kanagawa Prefecture and the second largest city in Japan by population after Tokyo and most populous municipality of Japan. It lies on Tokyo Bay, south of Tokyo, in the Kantō region of the main island of Honshu. It is a major commercial hub of the Greater Tokyo Area.
Yokohama's population of 3.7 million makes it Japan's largest incorporated city.
Yokohama developed rapidly as Japan's prominent port city following the end of Japan's relative isolation in the mid-19th century, and is today one of its major ports along with Kobe, Osaka, Nagoya, Hakata, Tokyo, and Chiba.
Yokohama was a small fishing village up to the end of the feudal Edo period, when Japan held a policy of national seclusion, having little contact with foreigners. A major turning point in Japanese history happened in 1853–54, when Commodore Matthew Perry arrived just south of Yokohama with a fleet of American warships, demanding that Japan open several ports for commerce, and the Tokugawa shogunate agreed by signing the Treaty of Peace and Amity.
A national university is generally a university created or run by a government, but which at the same time operates autonomously without direct oversight or control by the state. Some national universities are closely associated with national cultural or political aspirations. For example, the National University of Ireland in the early days of Irish independence collected a large amount of information on the Irish language and Irish culture. In Argentina, the national universities are the result of the 1918 Argentine university revolution and its subsequent reforms, which sought a more equal and secular higher education system without clerical or government influence by bestowing self government on the institutions.
See List of universities in Argentina.