A municipal institution in Hiroshima Prefecture’s historic seaport facing Japan’s Inland Sea, Onomichi City University was created as a women’s college in the face of postwar chaos in 1946. It went co-educational as a junior college in 1950.
It has held residence at its current campus since 1962 and it attained university status as Onomichi University in 2001, adding City to the name in 2012. It operates under the motto "wisdom and beauty" with "we cultivate", "we create" and "we utilise" given as the means to attaining those attributes.
It has about 1,300 students in two faculties – economics, management and information science and arts and culture, which includes the departments of Japanese literature and art and design. Each department also offers graduate study. Its president, Takeshi Nakatani, tells potential applicants via the university website of the advantages of small size as it creates "intimacy between students and also between students and teaching staff".
University facilities also include the Arts Museum and the satellite studio, a three-storey showcase for its work in a downtown shopping district.
Onomichi is of particular interest for both film enthusiasts and cat lovers. It was one of the main settings for the 1953 masterpiece Tokyo Story, regularly near the top of polls of the greatest films ever made, and a comparative lack of war damage has made it a popular location for shooting historic dramas.
Since 2015 the city website has offered a "cat’s street view", with attractions ostensibly narrated by 11 Onomichi Cats and the City Museum attained worldwide attention in 2018 for the efforts over two years of two local felines attempting to gain entry to its premises, coincidentally (or not) following an exhibition of cat-themed art.
