ABSTRACT
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.”