Japan

This course aims to deepen students' understanding of the United States by exploring diverse topics through an interdisciplinary approach.

The topics and materials covered in class includes historical events; traditional concepts rooted in the nation's founding ideals; a wide range of famous and lesser-known works of American literature, and even the lyrics of 1930s blues. All of these are relevant to contemporary America. Furthermore, this course encourages students to develop an interest in and critically explore racial issues in the United States, particularly in the ongoing era of the Black Lives Matter movement.

 

This is an advanced course in psychological statistics. The objective of the course is to gain knowledge of multivariate statistics especially non-experimental, cross-sectional data. The course covers how to select, conduct, interpret, and report quantitative statistical analyses to help answer research questions that involve multiple dependent variables. Students are expected to have taken PSY104 and PSY223. R and R Studio will be used as main statistical packages. 

This course studies significant Christian theological works by Americans, paying careful attention both to their contributions to Christian theology and to their context within the United States. One theme that emerges repeatedly, although certainly not the only important theme, is the question of what makes one a “true Christian." The course covers topics such as: Revivals and the First Great Awakening; the Holiness Movement and the Second Great Awakening; the Bible, the Civil War, and white Christian debates about slavery; the Social Gospel; the Fundamentalist-Modernist controversy and Pentecostalism; the World Wars and American power; American power, American oppression and liberation theology, and American culture and Christianity. 

This six-week summer course provides individual research training through the experience of belonging to a specific laboratory at Tohoku University. Students are assigned to a laboratory research group with Japanese and international students under the supervision of Tohoku University faculty. They participate in various group activities, including seminars, for the purpose of training in research methods and developing teamwork skills. The specific topic studied depends on the instructor in charge of the laboratory to which each student is assigned. The methods of assessment vary with the student's project and laboratory instructor. Students submit an abstract concerning the results of their individual research each semester and present the results near the end of this program.

This course examines Japanese schooling from sociological and comparative perspectives. The first section focuses on the socializing role of schooling. What kind of values and skills are learned in Japanese schooling? How do they differ from other societies? How do they change from preschool to high school? The second section focuses on the sorting mechanism of schooling. To what extent is Japanese education system an egalitarian system, in terms of social class or gender, when compared with other OECD countries? How do countries differ in their conceptualization or educational equality or mechanism of stratification? The last section addresses some recent educational reforms that have been widely debated in Japan.

This is a beginning Japanese langauge course designed for students who have never studied Japanese before. The course teaches the basics of Japanese language and focuse on communicative competence in speaking, listening, reading, and writing. 

By the end of the course, participants are expected to:

• Use common phrases in daily communication; 
• Exchange simple information and engage in familiar topics; 
• Talk about personal information, experiences, and simple comments in Japanese; 
• Read simple texts and notices written in hiragana, katakana and simple kanji, and
• Write phrases and sentences using simple expressions and words from model texts.

After providing a comprehensive overview of Korean history from ancient times to the modern era, this course focuses on the Joseon Dynasty (1392–1910) and examines its historical characteristics in terms of politics, society, and economy. Building on this understanding, the course seeks to gain insight into Korea’s traditional culture and society within East Asia, as well as the challenges of modernization. 

This course provides an overview of international trade, the movement of goods and services across national boundaries, while developing analytic tools that can be used to analyze world economic policy debates. This course is aimed at students interested in the dynamics around exports, imports and related economic policies. 

This course explores fundamental questions on law: What is the nature of law? What is the relation between law and morality or other norms? What is justice? The course critically analyzes selected readings and discusses the key questions in the philosophy of law.

The creation and implementation of public policy is fundamentally political. Every policy, whether it be economic, social, about health and wealth, or security, comes at the end of a political calculation. The leaders and bureaucrats who write, pass, and enforce public policies operate within political environments that shape and constrain their behavior. The study of public policy, then, is the study of optimal public policy, taking seriously the mitigating effects of the political process. This course is designed to introduce you to this area of study and practice. 

The first half of the course explores the main issues and theoretical frameworks within the field of public policy while developing methods in which to analyze, explain, and predict such phenomena (e.g. assessing the probability that a government provides programmatic as opposed to particularistic goods). The second half of the course utilizes these tools with which to understand actual policy in Japan, going through topics such as the politics behind budget processes; energy politics in light of the 3/11 disaster; constitutional change, and Japan's response to the COVID pandemic.