Asahi University is the only university in Mizuho, a town of around 55,000 in the Gifu Prefecture, in the interior of Honshu. It was founded as Gifu Dental University in 1971 and added a graduate school six years later, but changed to its present name in 1985 when the department of management was opened.
It aims to create students with "the sociality and creativity to open up future society and to nurture humans rich in human intelligence" and now has faculties of dentistry, education, management and law with graduate provision in dentistry, management and law. It has also run a Japanese Language and Culture course, which aims to enrol 60 students annually, since 2001.
Its earliest institutional link was when it incorporated with Murakumi Memorial Hospital in Gifu City in 1973. Murakumi Memorial relocated to the Asahi campus in 1984 and in 2006 was designated as Mizuho’s disaster relief hospital. It was renamed Asahi University Hospital 45 years after the incorporation. Other medical facilities on campus include a medical centre, dental clinic and dental hygienist school.
Dentistry students accounted for approximately one-third of the student body in 2018, with a male-female ratio at a little over two to one across the institution. The majority of around 100 overseas students took a management course in 2018.
Local programmes include a project under which students wishing to become accountants take a three-year preparatory course at school before undertaking the four-year degree course at Asahi, while women on campus have launched a club in the traditionally male-dominated sport of sumo wrestling.
