For the past two decades, the education ministry has worked hard to reform Japan's university system. In fiscal 1991, the ministry adopted the policy of giving priority to postgraduate programs, leading a number of national universities to change gakubu — traditional undergraduate-level entities such as schools of engineering, medicine, economics, literature, etc. — into research departments (kenkyu-ka).
Under this change, gakubu teachers started to teach at graduate school kenkyu-ka, and graduate school teachers started to teach at gakubu.
In the past, all universities in Japan — be they national, prefectural, municipal or private — had gakubu as their research core. Postgraduate programs were regarded as subordinate to gakubu. In gakubu for liberal arts and humanities especially, only a small portion of students sought to advance to postgraduate curricula. The majority of those who did move on wanted to pursue academic careers.