Japan

This course introduces key concepts and methods in the study of American society, culture, and history through the lens of science fiction film and television. How do cultural works mediate the historical development of state power, categories of social difference, and our everyday understandings of political belonging and conflict?

The study focuses on prominent works of American science fiction: The Twilight Zone (1960, 1961), Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978), Blade Runner (1982), Night of the Living Dead (1968), and Get Out (2017). These primary source materials will anchor our critical engagement with keywords in American Studies scholarship: nation, America, immigration, globalization, ethnicity, Orientalism, Asian, whiteness, white, Black, empire, state, racialization, diversity, and labor. Altogether, this course will familiarize us with the ideas that matter most for studying the United States through social, cultural, and political economic perspectives, while developing an analytical toolkit for narrative and film that you can use in a range of academic settings.

Students in this course should expect to watch one film every two weeks and to read five to 15 pages of American Studies scholarship every week. Students with or without prior study in American history and culture are welcome to take this class.

This course introduces the causes, consequences, and contexts of contemporary migration and ethnicity focusing on selected cases from Asia and the Americas. This course provides a sociological introduction to migration, migrant incorporation, and racial and ethnic relations. It considers how societies experience and manage immigration. Moreover, while migrants are a distinctive group, they are also part of a larger whole, with implications for how we comparatively understand ourselves. We examine key migration theories, concepts and contemporary debates focusing on the experiences of different groups of migrants. This course entails discussions on human mobility, power relations, and dynamics of structure, agency, adaptation and the interconnectedness of place and identity. Weekly readings will illuminate the social, economic, and political salience of migration and ethnicity.

This course is for students who will learn Japanese as a mother tongue, first language, or heritage language. The aim of this course is to provide a sound basis for studying Japanese at JLP for those students without formal training in Japanese language. The class meets for six hours per week. Students will be exposed to various spoken and written Japanese, and will acquire skills to study Japanese in an academic context.

This course introduces low intermediate level sentence patterns and teaches how to use them in practice. The course covers intermediate level grammar, expressions and aims to acquire a balanced mastery of the four skills: reading, listening, speaking and writing.

Upon completion, students are expected to acquire skills to read short sentences about Japanese culture, society and daily life, as well as understand and summarize the main points of sentences.

Inequality is a fundamental part of every society that exists on earth. There is no society that does not manifest some form of it. This course investigates the construction and especially the reproduction of inequality in social life. The main theoretical point upon which this course is based is that although different forms of inequality can seem subjectively to have what Jürgen Habermas has described as “unshakable facticity,” they are in fact constructed and reproduced by humans in social life. Our objective, therefore, is to examine more deeply some of the different ways in which inequality is manifest, and then examine how it is constructed, defined, justified, and reproduced. To investigate this issue in detail, the course introduces theoretical concepts through lectures and readings, conducting three analyses of the construction and reproduction of inequality. The analyses will focus on pre-assigned topics. Students must submit a 1500–1800-word essay that describes their findings for the first two topics. The final analysis essay will be 1800-2100 words. All essays submitted for the course are expected to be thoroughly researched and documented, and cogently argued. These exercises will help students learn more about inequality while also developing their analytical skills.