The chair system was introduced into the Japanese universities from Germany more than 100 years ago in the Meiji era. Since then, it made very little change and was preserved like antiquities in the medical schools.
During the past 100 years, there had been two opportunities to change it: first in the early 1970s at the time when new medical schools had been established all over Japan and second in 1991 at the time of change of the university chartering standards law which was conducted by the Japanese Ministry of Education toward a liberalization of the past law in order to let the universities match to the change of society and to the progress of art and science.
Although since the latter opportunity some change was observed mainly at graduate schools of the limited high-ranked universities, most of medical schools have neither changed their traditional chair system nor reformed their schools in spite of the ensured liberalization.
In this paper, why reorganization of chair system is necessary, how it can be done and also why and how redistribution of faculty members is crucial and can be performed are explained by citing an example at the University of Tsukuba which has experienced during the past two and half decades from the beginning of its establishment in 1973.

Referencing to one hundred and thirty years history of the modernized medical education in Japan, the author analyzed the stream of its renovation by classified it into four phases according to an old Chinese proverb, “They who want to know what shall be must consider what have been.” The change during sixty years after the World War II (the second phase) had been much more remarkable than that of seventy years before the War (the first phase). The unified medical education at all the new-system universities in the second phase had been diversified multidirectionally at many newlyestablished medical schools in order to meet the nation-wide demand to increase the number of young able physicians who became impulsive power group to innovate the traditional conservative medical society. The third phase had begun in 1991 when the university chartering standards law was liberalized vastly and every medical school could compose its curriculum more freely depending on its and student's demands like as order-made programs. Recent ten years, the fourth phase, are continuing up to today becoming the structure reform of medical education more remarkable and the education curricula core-oriented toward tomorrow's physician training. Now time has changed, “They who want to know what shall be must consider what will be.”