Tokyo Dental College, Suidobashi Campus

Tokyo Dental College marked its 120th anniversary in 2010. Its predecessor, Takayama Dental School, was founded in 1890 as the first institution of dental education in Japan. Since then, the college has continued to contribute to the development of dental medicine and the oral health of the nation for over a century. We can now boast a long record of furnishing our students with the knowledge and skills they need to provide the best that modern dental medicine has to offer, thus earning the trust of our patients.

Recent years have seen remarkable progress in the field of medicine and dental medicine. And nowhere more so than in the field of regenerative medicine, which promises great changes in what we can expect from medicine in the future. We are now faced with a rapidly aging population. It will be the duty of the dental professional to help this group retain oral health and function, thus ensuring that the patient's overall health will also be maintained. This means that the dentist will need to be able to diagnose and treat dental problems while also identifying their potential effect on overall systemic health.

In addition, the globalization of society as a whole means we must now aim at fostering young dentists capable of playing an active role on the international stage. To this end, we are actively engaged in fostering international academic exchange both in education and research, and have already established mutually rewarding sister-school relationships in many countries. Such opportunities will henceforth be available not only to our staff, but also our undergraduate students, and we are now developing programs aimed at broadening their international outlook while still in school. As a part of this project, we have initiated an Elective Study Program aimed at equipping our alumni with the high level of education they will need to provide the medical care that will be expected from them. In addition, we aim to remain a dental school with a heart, never forgetting our educational philosophy based on our foundation motto: "Character building is the first step in becoming a dentist".

Tokyo Dental College is proud of its tradition and status as the oldest institute of dental education in Japan. On this, our 120th anniversary, our main campus will move to Suidobashi in Tokyo, making history as we move forward into the coming century. We are firm in our resolution to contribute to the oral health of the community. We will do so by promoting the continuous development of dental medicine through cooperation with other medical colleges and medical institutions. Thus, together with our other two facilities in Chiba and Ichikawa, we will provide cutting-edge medical care to all our patients.

Tokyo Dental College has been selected as the first single-department college by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) to address the following two programs. These support programs are called GP (Good Practice). In order to foster high-level dental skills and the dentists themselves as a fully-rounded individuals, we have offered an IT environment for each step of the curriculum aimed at promoting high-quality dental education since 1998. Specifically, we have instituted consistent evaluation for each student throughout the 6 years of their course, using an original database to manage their entire examination history during that period. We have named this structured evaluation system "Global Evaluation".