Japan

This course explores the complex relationship between pluralism and community. This course defines pluralism as the existence of multiple races, ethnicities, cultural groups, religions, factional interests, political persuasions, etc. in society.  “Community” in this course refers to the existence of what we can broadly call a ‘sense of togetherness’ among members of society.   

Can pluralism and community exist side-by-side? The course explores three broad responses to this question. First, it considers perspectives that maintain to varying degrees that pluralism and community are compatible. Second, it considers perspectives that cast doubt on the compatibility of pluralism and community.  Third, the course considers perspectives that share the skepticism of the second broad response, but for opposing reasons.   

This course  explores how law and justice function in Japanese society. Beginning with the process of how the law was established, the course covers not only the court system, which is the core of dispute resolution, but also the alternative dispute resolution (ADR) system; the legal profession; access to justice issues; the family and the law, and law and gender issues.  The course examines the Japanese legal system from a critical perspective and seeks an understanding of the characteristics of the Japanese legal system and its function in Japanese society. 

Each class will include a student discussion session and students will be asked to write brief comments during or at the end of each lecture. 

The purpose of this course is to give students the ability to communicate in Japanese at an advanced level. The course is designed for students who have completed at least three to four semesters of formal training (no less than 300 hours) at the college level. Students are expected to possess the ability to read and write simple essays and communicate smoothly in everyday situations. Students improve their comprehensive Japanese language skills through discussion with peer students and presentations about Japanese culture and society.  To develop reading and listening comprehension skills, students will read and listen to texts about Japanese culture and society. In addition, students will learn how to communicate and express their opinion in Japanese through presentation, discussion, and writing practices.

The goal of this course is to acquaint students with the basic history, philosophy, methodologies, and practice of drama in the field of Education. Through the study of history, philosophy and practice of each practitioner, the course explores the potential of drama as a tool of diverse learning. Along with theoretical study, students will be exposed to hands-on exercises and techniques of “Educational Drama.” By the end of the course, a widened knowledge and perspective of the possibility of educational drama will be acquired.  

During the first four weeks, students will be exposed to many readings and a variety of drama techniques and methods to prepare for the design, implementation, and evaluation of drama activities. After this period, students will be divided into groups where they will be assigned a drama practitioner; create a lesson plan and conduct a drama. The whole class will reflect upon this activity at the end of the course.  

This course reviews and discusses the history of the notion of philosophy (as tetsugaku) within the history of modern Japan. In doing so, difficult questions relating to the very notion of philosophy itself will be asked. What is philosophy and what can make it “Japanese”? Is all philosophy done on Japanese shores “Japanese philosophy”? Otherwise, are there certain core or essential characteristics that make philosophy Japanese? In tackling these questions, the course seeks to learn more about the history of philosophical thought in modern Japan and seeks to reach a deeper understanding of the notion of philosophy itself. 

In the early 21st century, there were three techno-economic and strategic cores—Europe, North America, and East Asia, with East Asia being the fastest growing and most dynamic. Although the three regions are of approximately equal economic size, East Asia has been surging forward. East Asia includes China, the world's fastest growing continental economy and second largest economy; Japan, the third largest economy, the second largest source of global capital, and technological leader; South Korea, a technological leader, and Southeast Asia. East Asia is also becoming increasingly important militarily. East Asian strategic issues affect even geographically distant great power relations, including the trans-Atlantic relationship. 

This course focuses on the international relations of this crucial region. It begins by tracing the legacy of the Sino-Centric tributary system, a relatively hierarchical international relations system quite different from the anarchical Westphalian system. Then, it considers the impact of Western Imperialism; the rise and fall of Japanese Imperialism, and the Cold War. The remainder of the course focuses on the post-Cold War decade of the 1990s; the Asian Financial Crisis of 1997-98; the rise of regional multilateral institutions; the influence of historical memory on regional politics; East Asia under unipolarity; the rise of China and its complex relations with Japan and the US; China -Japan relations, and more generally, Asia’s relationship with Europe. The course concludes by considering several scenarios for Asian regional politics and this region's place in, and impact on, the global system over the next decades.

This course mainly considers various gender relations of the contemporary Japanese society from sociological and cultural perspectives. Students are expected to understand and critically analyze the basic characteristics of gender relations in Japan through various readings and class discussion. Students are expected to have critical perspectives on “normal” everyday life upon completion of this course. 

Programs written in programming languages ​​such as C or Java are translated into assembly language or machine language programs by a special software called a compiler. This course explains the basic concepts and formalization of programming languages, explaining how the programs we usually write are executed inside a computer and how the compiler is configured for that purpose. Compilers can generally be divided into two parts: a front end and a back end. This course focuses on the front end, which comprises of three parts: lexical analysis, syntactic analysis, and semantic analysis.  

This course increases knowledge of concepts and theories in consumer behavior, and of methods for analyzing consumer behavior. The goal of this course is to understand how these concepts and approaches relate to marketing decision making. A set of important topics on consumer behavior is selected for discussion.

This course aims to understand the structural "power" of the media through examining how the media, people, and society affect one another. In addition, the course addresses public relations and communications so that students can foster media and digital competency to use “owned media” safely and effectively.

The course addresses the following topics:

1. Media and power: the danger of a single story; case studies
2. Media and gender
3. Media and ethnicity; case studies
4. Discourse analysis 
5. Interactive communications in the Digital and SDGs age; case studies
6. Interactive Communications and Global PR campaigns