Ashikaga Gakko

What Ashikaga Gakko looked like originally and what it looks like now are two different stories — both worth knowing before you arrive.

Ashikaga Gakko is generally described as the oldest school in Japan. Its exact founding date is disputed — candidates range across several centuries — but by the Muromachi and Sengoku periods it was the leading centre of learning in eastern Japan, teaching Confucian classics, divination and medicine to students who came from across the country. A Jesuit missionary writing in the sixteenth century described it to Europe as Japan's great university.

What stands today is a reconstruction of the Edo-period campus: a gate inscribed with the school's name, a lecture hall of dark timber with tatami and a raised teaching platform, a library holding classical Chinese texts, and a pair of gardens. The hall is quiet enough that you can sit on the boards and look out at the garden, which is the intended way to experience it. It is ten minutes on foot from the station, next to Banna-ji, in a city very few foreign visitors stop in.