Japan

This advanced Japanese course is designed to improve communication skills needed on a business setting. A theme concerning Japanese culture and society is chosen in context of "business" and students are split into groups to engage in activities, discussion, and group work concerning the selected topic. The course aims to widen student perspectives and deepen their knowledge regarding various issues related to Japan and Japanese society, while acquiring skills needed in a Japanese business setting. The program offers various theme courses and students may take multiple sections. 

This course offers an introduction to the field of transcultural studies. It explores some of the processes of creative adaptation of foreign ideas and interactions between cultures on multiple levels to better understand human communication. Upon completion, students are expected to acquire knowledge of the transcultural approach and to understand the constructed nature of concepts such as boundaries, culture, nation, society, and civilization.

In developed countries, social security expenditures, such as public pension, health care and long-term care, account for a substantial part of the total expenditures of the public sector. The design of the social security system is an important policy issue in Japan, which is facing a rapidly aging population with a declining birthrate, as well as skyrocketing public debt. This course provides an overview of Japan's social security system and the economic theories behind the system.

This course introduces students to the basic framework and key concepts to understand the behavior of voters and politicians in elections. It also explores the foundations of political parties and electoral competition. The course acquaints one with the knowledge and terminology of political science, but also gives one tools to evaluate information and think critically about how politics works.

This course is a survey of the history of Great Britain from the Revolution of 1688 to Brexit. The course seeks to understand how Britain and the British came to be the way they are at present-economy, society, politics, and culture. It covers the rise and fall of British power and influence; the expansion of English power within the British Isles; the formation of the United Kingdom of Great Britain; the transformation of a traditional society; the rise and decline of British industrial power; the development of a class society, and the rise and fall of Britain as a great power. 

The science of particle physics is to understand our world by studying particles that constitute the universe and their interactions. This course explains the basic concept of the particle physics as well as the Standard model and its related important experiments and results.

The course covers the following topics: 

• Elementary particles and their types and characteristics of interactions
• Properties of nuclei
• Elementary particle detectors and accelerators
• Collider experiments and nuclear structure
• Quark and strong interaction 
• Weak interaction and symmetry breaking
• Standard model and verifications
• Neutrino oscillations

This advanced course on postcolonial literature situates the representative texts of postcolonial literature in broader intellectual and historical contexts, exploring not only the works of literature under this category but also the important issues often associated with postcolonial studies in general by means of comparative, historical, and theoretical approaches.

This course is an introduction to international trade for students who already have sound knowledge in introductory microeconomics. The course covers the following topics: the main reasons for trade; trade patterns; trade and income distribution; FDI and outsourcing; trade policy instruments; the World Trade Organization, and the multilateral trading system. 
 

This course provides students with an integrated understanding of the dynamics of environment-economy interactions, including the depth of dynamic and nonlinear behavior of the environmental and economic systems as they interact and change over time. This contributes to develop students’ innovative use of specialized knowledge and critical thinking skills in designing cost-effective environmental planning and programs in addressing many of today’s complex environmental challenges and economic issues. 

The course then discusses of a wide range of topics, covering the theory and practice in system dynamics; complex economy-environment system interactions and their resultant multiple cause and effect consequences; theory and practice in environmental policymaking, and the role of value orientations in sustainable environmental decision-making and policy design, among other subjects of interest. The discussions will be empirically tested using relevant case studies drawing from academic research and actual field study. 

This course focuses on translating short English texts (up to two pages) from various genres into Japanese. It teaches the basic skills necessary to begin translating texts from English to Japanese, further examining British and American culture, society, and literature. Translation consists in reproducing the reception language to the closest natural equivalent of the source-language message, first in terms of meaning and secondly in terms of style; translation should preserve somewhat the beauty of style and the flowing cadences of the original. This course aims for the class to create an accurate and reliable Japanese translation on the basis of the translation rules they learn each week.