English

This course examines the start-up formation process, such as the forms and regulatory compliances of different business structures, types and sources of funding for starting up and growth, ultimately leading to a viable exit strategy for all stakeholders. Students learn the entrepreneurship development from a financing viewpoint and gain insights into the investment opportunities from the perspectives of both the entrepreneurs and investors, with respect to the funding cycles and expectations. Students assess a venture's financial health through understanding the financial statements, essential financial indicators, creating financial projections, capital budgeting techniques and preliminary valuation methods. This course is suitable for those who are planning to embark on and/or currently involved in startup creation, with or without prior knowledge of accounting and finance, and would like to gain a working knowledge of how to read the financial statements in ways that will support business activities and decision making from the perspective of a startup.

In this course, students address the wider business and project management issues that affect the technological and engineering environment. Some of these issues include the business environment; principles of strategic management; portfolio, program, and project management; quality and control; organizational structure; cultural issues; and governance of project-based organizations and international projects.

This course looks into current environmental and social sustainability topics in business. The course considers the topics from a global perspective and visits points specific to Japan, and helps students assess environmental and social sustainability concepts independently from the perspective of businesses and consumers.

The New Woman, a controversial figure who became prominent in British literature in the late 19th century, challenged traditional views of femininity and represented a more radical understanding of women's nature and role in society. She was associated with a range of unconventional behavior – from smoking and bicycle-riding to sexuality outside marriage and political activism. This course examines some of the key literary texts identified with the New Woman phenomenon including women’s journalism in the period. The course’s reading are organized around central thematic concerns such as sexuality and motherhood, suffrage and politics, and career and creativity. Students consider to what extent the New Woman was a media construction or whether the term reflected the lives of progressive women in the period. 

This course provides an outline of the evolutionary history and morphological diversity of fossil reptiles. This class especiallly focuses on the origin, evolution and extinction of major groups such as turtles, crocodiles, marine reptiles, and dinosaurs. Fossil reptiles also include various extinct groups such as mammal-like reptiles and gigantic marine forms (e.g., ichthyosaurs) as well as flying giants (pterosaurs). Reptiles are also important for understanding origin of living birds and ma mammals. Visual instruments and real specimens would be used during the lectures for the aid of comprehension. Preparation of fossil materials would be organized for students in this lecture. Museum excursion or field trip should be organized as optional events on weekends. 

This course traces the conception of authentic existence in the works of thinkers from the Existentialist tradition, such as Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Hannah Arendt, and Copenhagen’s own Søren Kierkegaard. Among other things, the course observes how ethical thinking has moved from the language of duty to that of personal answerability, and how the search for meaningful personal existence has increasingly become the responsibility of the individual. The unique vocabulary of these authors appears not only in works of philosophy, theology, and psychology, but also literature and theater, which illustrates that we understand ourselves via the stories we tell, and that these narratives are necessarily told in dialogue with “the Other,” our fellow human beings.

Dynamics in the Chinese financial markets has attracted much international attention. This course provides an understanding of how the Chinese financial markets originated and developed, what reforms have been done, the Chinese characteristics, and the challenges and difficulties in future reforms. Starting with a comprehensive introduction, the course covers the major financial markets in China, including the central bank and the banking system, the security market and the foreign exchange market. The topics discussed for each market include the fundamental concepts and theories; the history and facts in China; a comparison of the domestic and international systems; examples and cases; and future reforms. 

This course introduces some major theories of international relations, providing students with a better understanding of world events and opportunities to critically engage with theories to assess their usefulness and limits. The course aims to equip students with intellectual tools with which they can better navigate themselves in the world as broadly informed and critically minded global citizens.  

The technological advances associated with Virtual Reality (VR), as well as its close cousins such as Augmented Reality (AR) and Extended Reality (XR), represent a fundamental shift in how humans experience the digital realm. Using devices such as VR-headsets, we can now access digital environments full of computer-generated simulations in a way that allows for a more intuitive kind of interactive experience than is typically afforded by more familiar uses of computers. In recent years, via devices such as the Oculus Rift, VR-technology has become increasingly accessible in the home and it is anticipated to become even more ubiquitous in the near future.

This class aims to examine a range of philosophical questions associatedwith VR. As we shall see, VR gives us new ways to both articulate classic philosophical problems and also to sharpen those problems. The relevant philosophical questions are wide-ranging, encompassing topics in epistemology (“Can you know you are not in a virtual world?”), metaphysics (“Are virtual worlds real?”), and value theory (“Can you live a good life in a virtual world?”). In examining these issues, we will focus on David Chalmers’ (2022) treatment of VR in his pioneering book Reality+, where Chalmers argues for a range of bold answers to these questions (and others): that we cannot know that we are not in a virtual world, that virtual worlds are just as real as non-virtual worlds, and that it is possible to lead a meaningful and valuable life in a virtual reality. By the end of the class, students will not only have been introduced to many of the most central philosophical problems, but will have further evaluated both the ways in which technology can shed light on old problems in philosophy and the ways in which philosophy can shed light on new problems about technology.

The media landscape and associated industries are in a constant state of evolvement, repeatedly undergoing transformations in their manner of production and positioning within social and thus market contexts. These dynamic processes of change within the broader field of media products and services are often intertwined with and conditioned by associated innovations in the enabling and underlying technological frameworks employed to produce, distribute and consume them. Innovations in communication technology thus also entail an impact on individual, social and psychological aspects of modern life. While this impact has long been influential, pressures of digitization and digital transformation have been making the need for a scholarly assessment of aforementioned processes ever more apparent. In this seminar we will thus explore current research and theory aiming to shed light on the intricacies of such developments, getting to know different dimensions of innovation and connecting them to practical examples of how these processes take shape within the wider media landscape. The course thus offers a rather broad perspective on what characterizes media innovation, how it develops, and what structural conditions facilitate and shape it.