Japan

This course aims to master grammar and sentence patterns, focusing on the textbook, "Daigaku Nihongo Shokyu Tomodachi Vol. 2" (Lessons 19-24).

Textbook: "University Japanese: Beginner's Tomodachi Vol. 2" edited by the Japanese Language Education Center for International Students, Tokyo University of Foreign Studies.

This course studies the social function of language from a micro-linguistics point of view. Language is analyzed in relation to social structure. For example, we may casually say in our daily conversations that people in China speak Chinese, or that “we” speak Japanese. In this course, we re-examine concepts such as language, society, speech community, and code, and analyze the linguistic choices speakers make in order to express their identity in the context of society.

Industrialization from the 1880s not only accelerated productivity growth but also transformed Japanese society into a more market-oriented system, the entire process of which is called the industrial revolution. The modern sectors in Japanese society composed a classical market economy from the 1880s to the 1910s. The development in the period was supported by the well-integrated international market and was at least partially accommodated by the pool of slack labor in the traditional sector. 

Those favorable environments were impaired from the 1920s, especially in the 1930s. Without a stable international financial market, the macroeconomic stability of a national economy had to be sustained by individual states. Such an international condition instead exacerbated the difficulty of managing society as the labor market became tighter and the growing modern sector absorbed slack labor in rural regions. In the end, Japan chose a state-coordinated market economy after the experiment of a command economy during the Second World War. 

Then, from the 1980s, the economy gradually returned to the standard, rule-based market economy. This course provides an overview of institutional changes in the Japanese economy from the 1920s to the 2000s and to understand how institutional and organizational factors work in a changing society.