The Japanese audience has long loved period dramas, including ones based on the lives of real people, generally men wearing topknots. And usually, at some point, the swords come out, as in the story of the 47 ronin (masterless samurai) who in 1703 attacked a shogunate official in revenge for his role in the death of their lord two years earlier. In its many retellings on stage and screen, much of this incident has been fictionalized, but the central characters are taken from life.
"Gakko wo Tsukuro (Let's Create a School)" is Seijiro Koyama's drama about the real former samurai who in 1880 founded Senshu University, the first college in Japan to offer specialized instruction in law and economics, and it features no swords whatsoever. Or bloodshed for that matter, not to mention tempestuous love affairs, vicious power struggles or any other of the usual plot machinery.
Instead it is closer to a docudrama, a genre more common on television in the West, such as "You are There," an early dramatized history show that famed TV anchor Walter Cronkite hosted from 1953 to 1957. The narrator of "Let's Create a School" doesn't inject herself, Cronkite-like, into the historical action, interviewing the characters with an anachronistic mic, but the story does stop dead for extended off-camera explanations, with looks at historical documents and photos, as well as views of the film's various locations today.