Japan

This course provides an introduction to jazz music and its history. Assigned readings focus on the music’s history; lectures attempt to bring that history to life, using examples from a wide range of sound recordings and film footage. The course devotes particular attention to the complex dynamic between change and continuity as the music developed over the course of the twentieth century, but also explores how jazz influenced and interacted with other musical forms. Although the emphasis will be on American jazz, the course will also consider jazz produced in other cultural contexts, including Japan.

Foreign policy analysis (FPA) seeks to better understand how the foreign policy of a state is formulated not only by government actors but also other stakeholders. These can be domestic players, such as political parties, politicians, government ministers, foreign and defense ministries, but also the economic sector, think-tanks, and non-state actors, or outside actors such as intergovernmental organizations (EU, ASEAN, NATO, or the World Bank), or governments and leaders of other countries. One focus is the decision-making process within governments, domestic and international constraints, the drafting process of foreign policies, their implementation, and their public defense against domestic or international critique.

This advanced Japanese course develops Japanese skills in an academic setting. Students are split into groups to engage in activities, discussion, and group work concerning the selected topic. The goal of the class is to help students to acquire academic language skills required in a variety of educational settings. The program offers various theme courses and students may take multiple sections.  

For Fall/Autumn 2023, students in this course will participate in the Virtual Business Professional Project (https://www.marshall.usc.edu/departments/business-communication/vbp-project) which will be coordinated by the Marshall School of Business at the University of Southern California (USC). Students will be assigned to a team and will collaborate with students from other universities on a project about major global companies. 

From the VBP Project website: 
The VBP Project is a global student collaboration project created and managed by business communication faculty at the Marshall School of Business at USC. The goal of the VBP Project is to help students develop skills necessary to succeed in a fast-paced global business environment that is increasingly relying on social platforms and virtual collaboration for their internal and external communication.  Every semester, 500 to 700 students participate in VBP. These students collectively represent over 50 countries around the world and study at 17 universities in 10 different countries.
 

This course is for students who have studied half of the basic composition course. It will helps develop listening and speaking skills in preparation for basic level conversations. This course is based on the composition and composition patterns studied in the course, ESSENTIAL JAPANESE 4M. It is recommended that this course is taken together with ESSENTIAL JAPANESE 4M.

Textbook: "University Japanese: Beginner's Tomodachi Vol. 2" edited by the Japanese Language Education Center for International Students, Tokyo University of Foreign Studies. 

This advanced course examines the political economy of East Asia. It treats East Asia as a political-economic space beyond the boundaries of individual countries, and pays equal attention to the past and the present. The course covers a wide range of topics, including the silk road, the tributary system, the circulation of money, the political economy of colonialism, migration and diaspora, the adoption of modern state system, the developmental state, regional production networks, East Asian regionalism, and the rise of China.