Japan

This course explores the relationship between religion and violence through a close reading of one of the foundational texts for the understanding of this relationship - R. Girard's Violence and the Sacred. The course analyzes this text, while examining criticisms or developments of Girard's thought from William Cavanaugh, Luce Irigaray, Sarah Coakley, and John Milbank. 

This course requires basic programming skills, which includes an understanding of what variables are; the basic structure of loops; Python indexing, and slicing of iterables. It expands on programming skills from a digital humanities perspective. The course focuses on Python pandas for data analysis and data manipulation and uses matplotlib for visualization. The course also instructs on version control using git. The latter half of the course focuses on social media analysis including network analysis, topic modeling, and sentiment analysis.

It is strongly recommended that students have taken the intermediate course “Python Programming for Digital Humanities” or a similar one before taking this course.

This course continues the exploration of various moral theories, emphasizing approaches which are not part of standard introductions. 

After discussing contemporary utilitarianism, the course looks at ethical egoism and its standing in empirical research on, e.g., human evolution. Subsequently, the course discusses David Ross's idea of prima facie duties within ethical pluralism and Tom Scanlon's contractualism in which he expands John Rawls’ approach to morality as such. The course concludes with moral particularism and its denial that there are general moral principles. 

This course delves into labor in China through an anthropological lens and pays attention to various aspects, including skill and livelihood; institution and reform; culture and technology, and gender and family, based on relevant literature and first-hand fieldwork materials obtained through the teacher’s research. The concept of "labor" is not confined to Marxism, but it is extended by specific materials from anthropological labor studies. The course aims not only to lead students to master multiple situations of labor in the Chinese context, but also encourages a reflexive exploration of students finding their own positions in society.

This course introduces basic grammar of classical Japanese. The class reads a wide range of original Japanese texts from the eighth to mid-twentieth centuries, including poetry, tales, legal writings, etc. 

This course is conducted in English, but since it involves translation from classical Japanese to English, having intermediate Japanese proficiency (2 years of Japanese) is recommended.

This course covers econometrics techniques for analyzing data to answer various economic and financial questions. The course introduces the nature of econometrics and economic data, then examines various types of regression analysis.

This course is designed for international students who have passed the Japanese Language Proficiency Test N2 level. It focuses on developing the Japanese language skills necessary for university life through a variety of practice activities, such as speeches, presentations, discussions, and role-playing.

Eligibility: B1 level in the CEFR/JF Standard for Japanese-Language Education (N2 in the JLPT). Ability to read about 750 basic kanji is recommended (equivalent to having completed K300).

By the end of this course, students are expected to:
・Have gained guidance for living a meaningful study abroad life by discussing career development.
・Have improved their Japanese expression skills and build interpersonal relationships.
・Have developed problem-solving skills.

This course provides an introductory survey of post-war Japanese international relations, with particular emphasis on the development of the US-Japan alliance and the evolution of relations between Japan and neighboring Asian states. It begins with a study of the making of the San Francisco System, and then concentrates on the major events that shaped the history of Japan up to the years after the Cold War. Through the analysis and explanation of historical events, particular efforts are made to place those events that relate to Japan in the context of transformations in the structure of wider international relations. 

This course performs a comparative study of the U.S and Japan to better understand the unique challenges and opportunities their leaders face. The course covers the Presidential System on the United States and the Parliamentary System of Japan; Political Parties; Electoral Processes and Elected Members; Women in Politics, and Bureaucracy and Policymaking.

This course provides a general overview of how the relationship between thought, knowledge and feeling (judgment of the beautiful or the sublime) is considered in modern Western philosophy. By learning to distinguish not only between thought and knowledge but also between cognitive judgment and aesthetic judgment, students are expected to become capable of reflecting critically on their own presupposed knowledge and discovering the role of imagination.