The university was chartered by the Meiji government in 1877 under its current name by amalgamating older government schools for medicine , various traditional scholars and modern learning . It was renamed " the " in 1886 , and then in 1897 when the Imperial University system was created . In September 1923 , an earthquake and the following fires destroyed about 700,000 volumes of the Imperial University Library . The books lost included the , a collection of about 10,000 books . The books were the former possessions of Hoshino Hisashi before becoming part of the library of the university and were mainly about Chinese philosophy and history
an earthquake
1923 Great Kantō earthquake
University of Tokyo