Japan

This course is an introductory course for Kyudo, a traditional Japanese archery. Students are taught the basic handling of the equipment, and how to use it properly. The emphasis is placed on posture when shooting arrows and repetition of the basic skill sets. Additionally, students explore a traditional Japanese martial art and acquire proper etiquette.

The theme for this comparative thought course varies each semester. The theme of "Mysticism East and West" explores the nature and significance of mystical experience from the angles of philosophy, psychology, theology and religious history. Mystical documents representing the Christian, Hindu, Buddhist, Daoist, and Muslim traditions are read and discussed.

This course is designed to provide fieldwork experience in a classroom setting. Students learn to analyze a language that they do not know through hands-on experience. This is not a lecture course. It is a specialized advanced-level course that provides opportunities in the classroom to use techniques of language elicitation, and to gain practice in gathering and describing a language using only data from an informant who is a native speaker of the language. Imagine this situation. You survive a plane crash but you are trapped in an isolated mountain forest. You know neither the language nor the culture. The local people do not know yours. You start to learn language and customs. Your method is hands-on but systematic -- planning and keeping records with paper and pencil. In the social sciences, this activity is termed fieldwork. In each class students encounter and gather data from an informant or consultant who is an expert in the language they work with. Previous language analysis has been done with speakers of Twi, Yoruba, Tagalog, Dutch, Okinawan, Thai, and Russian, as well as with Deaf signers of ASL and JSL.

This course takes a historical approach to understanding Korea's popular culture, by tracing and chronicling its development from the early modern period till today. The first part covers the colonial period, when popular culture appears in its nascent form; the second part concentrates on its development after liberation and through industrialization and democratization; the third part examines the contemporary popular culture scene. The objective is to build an in-depth understanding of Korea's popular culture through both diachronic and synchronic approaches. The course also discusses the global appeal of Korean pop culture in recent years, often referred to as Hallyu or the Korean Wave, and critically analyzes the characteristics of its content, find reasons for its popularity, its impact in the formation of a new cultural identity of the Koreans, and its implications to the broader global community. Assessment: final exam, papers, group presentation, reading assignment, attendance and participation.

This course introduces probability theory. It covers a standard set of topics, such as random variables, condititonal probability, and conditional exception. The course is lecture style, followed by exercises. Each lecture focuses on illustrating key concepts and results by examples, rather than fully developing the theory.

This course offers you to learn some fundamental knowledge about management, organizations, and business strategies particularly in the Japanese contexts. By using cases extensively throughout the course, the course provides fundamental knowledge about strategy and organizations of Japanese corporations and develops skills for analyzing business organizations. The topics discussed include innovation, platform businesses, diversification, profitability, business model canvas, and organizational renewal. Cases include Komatsu, Rakuten, Ina Food, SONY, and Toto.

The courses is a survey of American writers in their historical milieu and the reading of outstanding literary works. The representative works are studied while considering the historical background of American literature. Starting with Nathaniel Hawson's THE MAYPOLE OF MERRY MOUNT short story, Henry James's introductory DAISY MILLER, and William Faulkner's PANTALOON IN BLACK short story, students learn how to read the meaning embedded in the text. The course examines the narrator's technique and the meaning of the symbols. This is a discussion-centered class and sufficient preparation is required. Active class participation is expected in each class.

This course introduces global economic history from the eighteenth century to the present. It mainly focuses on economic interactions between the West (namely, Western Europe and the United States) and other parts of the world. The course traces European activities in extra-European worlds in the process of economic globalisation, but it also sheds light on non-European actors in Africa and Asia to make it easier to understand that their agencies formed a part of the emergence and remaking of the modern global economy. Topics include industrialization, de-industrialisation, slavery, colonialism, tropical development, energy, and the environment. Assessment: exam, class participation.

In this class we read, in English translation, the works of two of the most prominent, internationally-acclaimed contemporary Japanese authors: Yoko Tawada and Haruki Murakami. The first half of the semester is spent reading the award-winning English translation of Yoko Tawada's novella, The Emissary. Tawada's work presents, with a touch of humor as well as pathos, a dystopian vision of Japan in the near future, in which the country is damaged almost beyond repair as a result of large-scale nuclear contamination, its people and language evolving in unexpected directions. The class then reads Jay Rubin's translations of Haruki Murakami's short stories, likely starting with "On Seeing the 100% Perfect Girl One Beautiful Morning". Each text is discussed with a focus on rhetorical play and cultural representation, with occasional reference to the Japanese texts. Proficiency in Japanese is not required, but those studying the language are highly encouraged to read the original texts, either in advance or during the semester. English-Japanese dictionaries will come extremely handy for anyone.