It is the direct predecessor of the Faculty of Integrated Human Studies of Kyoto University.
The Third Higher School traced its roots to the Chemistry School (舎密局, Seimi-kyoku), an institution for Chemistry and Physics founded in Osaka in 1869.
Seimi is a Japanese transcription of the Dutch word chemie, meaning chemistry.
[1] In 1894, this institution evolved into the Third Higher School, which was then a specialised boarding school,[2] roughly equivalent to an American college with departments of law, engineering, and medicine.
[4] The situation changed when the aristocratic politician Saionji Kinmochi, who was from a prominent kuge family in Kyoto, suggested the founding of the nation's second university using war reparations from the First Sino-Japanese War.