Tohoku University is pursuing bold, autonomous governance and an aggressive international strategy to reach the world’s top 30 universities. The campus emphasizes agile governance and self-driven international competition, with a strategy centered on research and organizational reform. It has established nine international research clusters in fields including materials science and is accelerating innovation through industry–university collaboration, while adopting governance reforms such as a provost system. In DX, it has implemented an online operations push with RPA to save substantial administrative time and to support an inclusive online education environment. On the international front, it has taken proactive steps to address geopolitics by setting up a US study advisory desk and considering hosting Harvard students, and it plans to fund its expansion by raising tuition for international undergraduates and graduates by about 1.7x from 2027 onward, a first among national universities. Taken together, these rapid, proactive moves position the university as a model for other Japanese national universities.