Japan

The course introduces a variety of concepts and theories to analyze global governance, with a focus on organizations and institutions including international and regional organizations, firms, and NGOs. Course materials discuss topics from international relations, political science, economics, sociology, and anthropology. Substantively, the course covers diverse issues such as security, development, and science.   

Drawing on the seminar style, the course requires each person to contribute through discussion, presentation, and a written research proposal on topics of their choice.   

This course must be taken simultaneously with CONTEMPORARY JAPANESE ECONOMY B. This course names and addresses the causes of economic problems that emerged in Japan within the last few decades. 

This course deals with ethnic and cultural minority groups in contemporary Japan. Japan is often described as a homogeneous society; indeed, it has a very dominant ethnic and cultural mainstream. This course looks at how minority groups have positioned themselves vis-a-vis the mainstream in finding a place for themselves in Japanese society while exploring their many fascinating similarities and differences in experiences.  

This course provides an overview of the fundamentals in probability and statistics. It aims to provide a good understanding of the methods of probability and statistical analysis of data. Students will be able to use these statistical methods for their own studies and later in professional practice. 

This advanced Japanese course is designed to improve reading skills. A theme concerning Japanese culture and society is chosen for each course and students are split into groups to engage in activities, discussion, and group work concerning the selected topic. The goal of the class is for students to widen their perspectives and deepen their knowledge regarding various issues related to Japan and Japanese society. The program offers various theme courses and students may take multiple sections. 

This is an intermediate English Historical Linguistics course which should be taken after studying the basics of linguistics offered in CO201 Introduction to Language Studies and/or CO202 Introduction to English Linguistics at this school or anything equivalent to these anywhere.  

Building on the knowledge from these introductory courses, this course investigates the internal linguistic development of the English language from a synthetic to an analytic language, i.e. loss of inflections, depending on a more fixed word order, and emerging periphrases and function words such as auxiliaries and prepositions in constructing sentences. It also delves into the external influences on the English language throughout its history, namely, lexical borrowings from Greek, Latin (Classical and Medieval), Old Norse, and (Norman-)French words. 

The course first studies selected features of pronunciation, spelling, and grammar of English from its earliest stage of development. It also considers the cultural, social, and political aspects of the external history of English, especially in terms of vocabulary.  

By the end of the course one will have understood why the English language has become the lingua franca of the world but, for many speakers of it, whether native or non-native, ‘”English is among the easiest languages to speak badly, but the most difficult to use well’ (C. L. Wrenn, The English Language, 1977, p.9). 

This is an advanced-level Data Science course, focusing on deep learning, which has witnessed great success over the past decade. Two of the most successful fields of deep learning are image processing and natural language processing. 

Some of the most successful applications of deep learning in image processing include object detection, image segmentation, and image classification. In natural language processing, deep learning has been used to develop applications such as machine translation, text classification, automatic summarization and question answering.  

The course begins with an overview of deep learning, and a review class for Python and the PyTorch library respectively. Then, the course studies linear algebra and calculus from numerical perspectives. The course also reviews the basics of statistics and information theory for deep learning and the basics of machine learning, including topics like overfitting, supervised and unsupervised learning, and stochastic gradient descent.  

The course introduces neural network models using the familiar linear and softmax regression, as well as the concept of multilayer perceptrons and the essential technique of backward propagation.  The course also studies various ways to regularize deep neural networks, such as putting norm penalties or allowing dropout, and how to do optimization for training these regularized deep neural networks. The latter half of the course focuses on convolutional neural networks for image processing and recurrent and recursive neural networks for natural language processing. Last, the recent important topic of fine-tuning a pre-trained large language model will also be covered. 

The Asia Workshop is a dynamic working space where students and instructors work together to discuss emerging issues in Asia. Topics for discussion changes every year to keep up with changes at both regional and global scales.
 

This workshop discusses the following questions: What is Asia? Is Asia just a group of countries with different cultures, histories, and economies? What is so unique about Asia? What, in addition to its geographical location, makes Asia “Asian” and remain “Asian” in the context of globalization? 

The workshop provides an answer to these questions through a series of guest-speaker lectures on Asia and its member countries and presents fieldwork activities to engage students in intensive observation of what is around their living environment. Immersive technologies will be introduced to facilitate students’ first-hand observations.

Cells are the structural and functional units of living organisms. Understanding the basics of cell biology is essential for studying all areas of life sciences and any related branches of natural sciences. The main objective of this course is to learn the essential principles of cell biology by learning how the living cells are made and operating from a molecular perspective: especially, how DNA, RNA and proteins cooperatively work inside the cells to allow the maintenance, replication, and responses to stimuli. This course covers the textbook Essential Cell Biology together with Biology B, which will be held in the spring semester. 

Upon finishing this course, students will have a solid grasp of the structure of cells and how they replicate themselves, exert cellular functions and communicate with each other. More concretely, the course introduces intracellular structure and molecular dynamics inside cells, mechanisms of DNA replication, repair and recombination, gene expression and its regulation, and cellular signaling. In addition, the course also features the research topics of the instructors, all of whom are young biologists/biochemists in FRIS, so that students can get a glimpse of cutting-edge sciences. 

What does it mean to exert, obey, resist, or think power? How does political power relate to violence and authority? What is the relationship between secular and religious notions of power? In inviting students to reflect upon these questions through a wide range of texts and classroom dynamics, this course explores the concept of political power and its multiple forms of expression, thus introducing critical theory, political thinking, and the global humanities. Topics include imperialism and colonialism; democracy; sovereignty; the relationship between intellectuals and power; feminist and revolutionary perspectives on power; critical, pedagogical, and aesthetic approaches to political power relations.