Why Oiso, an hour outside Tokyo

People ask why the campus is not in central Tokyo. It is a fair question. The standard playbook for an education business says to rent a room near a major station, because that is where enrollment is easiest. We knew the playbook and chose Oiso, about an hour outside the city, anyway.

The reason is that residency is the core of what we teach. Sitting through a lecture and going home is one kind of learning. Spending several days in the same place, eating together, arguing about cases at night, is another kind, and for international fellows it is the kind that matters. Much of what a visiting clinician takes home happens outside the classroom, at dinner or on a walk along the water. You cannot design for that in a conference room on the eleventh floor.

Some specifics about the place. Oiso is about an hour from Tokyo Station by train, and close enough to Haneda that arriving from abroad does not eat a day. The sea is in front, hills behind. Since the Meiji era it has been a retreat town where politicians and industrialists kept houses, which is a polite way of saying that people have been coming here to think for over a century. For a program measured in days rather than hours, it is hard to do better.

There is also an honest financial argument. Run a residential program on central-Tokyo rent and the rent walks straight into the tuition. Since we publish our prices, we cannot quietly absorb that. In Oiso we can design teaching, practice, lodging and meals as one package and still land at a price a working professional can pay out of pocket. Our rule that education must pay its own way and our choice of address are the same decision.

We did not abandon the city. The clinical side of the loop lives in Minami-Aoyama, where the patients are. Quiet and study in Oiso, practice and implementation in Aoyama, an hour apart. That distance is not a compromise. It is the design.