Japan

This course is designed for students who have completed intermediate-level Japanese language courses or the equivalent. Upon completion of the course, students are expected to compose sentences using more advanced grammar patterns.

Digital technology has fundamentally and dramatically changed the way people live; the way society develops, and, most importantly, it refined the fundamental nature of human civilization. We are spending more time and effort in borderless cyberspace but, at the same time, dealing with issues in a multicultural physical space. Technology and society co-evolve, thus making it essential to understand both in order to grasp the best opportunities and also prepare for the upcoming challenges that arise from the ever-increasing integration of technologies into our societies.

This course broadly covers issues related to emerging technology advancement and addresses its critical societal challenges such as privacy, cybersecurity, governance, media, business stability, law enforcement, justice, and new modes of the workforce, among others. The course also investigates Japanese internet governance as well as privacy protection rules in a global context for a better understanding of not just the Japanese, but the global trends in building healthy relations between technology and society. The course aims to educate students to think critically about approaches and possible solutions to the challenges in the physical and virtual domain.

 

This course is designed for students who have some experience learning Japanese. The course aims to enhance listening and speaking skills through teaching and practice of vocabulary and expressions needed for everyday conversation. 

This course is designed for pre-advanced students to explore sentence structures, vocabulary, and kanji via newspaper articles and a textbook. After reading articles, students discuss topics related to the text and write an essay which is revised numerous times as to grasp the Japanese style of essay-writing. Students explicate the articles read in class, dissecting various grammar-points and creating example sentences and sharing them with the class. The various topics covered in the textbook provides students means to expand their Japanese abilities and enables them to think critically about such topics with newfound abilities. 

This course is designed for students learning Japanese for the first time. The course focuses on the acquisition of grammar and sentence patterns based on the textbook Elementary Japanese for Academic Purposes Vol.1 (Lesson 1 to 6). Students must understand hiragana before taking this course.

This course is designed to assist students who seek to bring cross-cultural theory and research into their business practices in order to develop the intercultural competence necessary to interact confidently and successfully with Japanese businesspeople. Theoretical discussions and intercultural sensitivity workshops are included in this course to achieve these goals. The comparative approach allows for examining how people practice business differently, depending on explicit and implicit sets of general cultural assumptions, rules, norms, and values. The course aims to understand cultural differences in businesspeople’ s attitudes towards work, companies, and the relationship between individuals (colleagues or co-workers and clients/customers) and organizations (counterparts or partners). The course also seeks to understand possible cultural roots of Japanese business practices and behavior, highlighting phenomena that are only indirectly observable, such as harmony, loyalty, discipline, patience, respect for senior staff, and the importance of moderation.

A good mixture of lectures, class discussions, and workshops comprise the activities of this course.

This course covers classic macroeconomic issues such as inflation, unemployment, interest rates, growth, and technological progress. The course also provides the foundations needed to understand how the macroeconomy operates and presents various solutions to economic problems.

This course acquaints students with an improved understanding of the key disciplines of environmental economics pertaining to the study of the relationships between the economy and the environment. It equips students with the practical knowledge of environmental economic principles, environmental sciences and other related disciplines in managing the environment-economy relationships towards achieving a more resource-efficient and environmentally sustainable economy for the benefit of society. This takes the course to an extensive range of studies covering the connection between the economics of ecosystem services, ecosystem multifunctionality and environmental value which integrally linked to resource efficient economy and human welfare; the relationship between economic use of the natural system and environmental externality; market mechanism; environmental and resource conservation; cost-benefit analysis; valuation techniques and their limitations, among other subjects of interest.

The course focuses on Japan`s Environment and Energy Policies, especially its policies toward renewable energy. From a comparative perspective alongside other East Asian nations and Northern Europe (Norden), it analyzes Japan's role in global climate negotiations and its policies toward renewable energy in the context of its traditional reliance on fossil fuels and nuclear power.

By the end of the course, students should be well-versed in global environmental issues as well as Japan's policies for combating climate change and promoting a shift toward renewable energy. An understanding of the current state of Japan's transition toward using renewable energy for energy generation; the further electrification of transportation, and the shift toward a hydrogen economy, is also an expected outcome.

This course is offered by the Faculty of Economics and is designed to help students improve their oral, presentational and academic writing skills in English. The topics to be considered in class will vary slightly depending on the students' interests and academic orientation. The actual work will consist of student presentations; reading and analyzing student essays and short academic papers, and class discussions. Specific advice will be given to each participant on how to approximate their writing and oral presentation to more natural patterns of speech.