Musashino Art University (武蔵野美術大学, Musashino Bijutsu Daigaku, MAU) is a private university in Kodaira, western Tokyo, founded ... in 1962 and having roots going back to 1929. Musashino Art University (MAU), located in Tokyo, marked the 80th anniversary of its foundation in 2009. MAU was founded as a private art school and was officially designated as a university in 1962. Currently, MAU is one of the leading art institutes in Japan, with over 4,500 students and 2,000 correspondence students. From its start, the university taught fine art and industrial design; it later added architecture, fashion, and other fields. MAU has exchange agreements with universities in other countries. It has a graduate school that awards master's degrees and doctorates. Since the earliest days of Musashino Art University, our mission has been to train professionals equipped with a good general education and of superlative character for careers in various fields of the formative arts, focusing primarily on the realms of fine arts and design. To achieve this, the University is deeply mindful of the need to arm students with a combination of generalist and specialist skills, and remain faithful to our founding spirit of providing art education that allows students to function with true freedom as human beings, and producing artists of well-rounded erudition. Japanese tertiary education is currently undergoing a major transformation, and many in the sector believe that total immersion in a specialist domain should be the defining characteristic of a university education. However, this is not necessarily the position of MAU, which aims to offer the best possible grounding in the formative arts. read more