Japan

This course is for students learning Japanese as a mother tongue, first language, or heritage language. Through this course, students will acquire such basic skills as vocabulary building, reading comprehension, writing passages, and oral expression necessary for university students. Prerequisite: “Introduction to Japanese for First/Heritage Language Speakers” or equivalent. Six class hours/week. 

By the end of this course, students will be able to:
read coherent sentences with consideration of keywords, the main points of paragraphs, and the overall structure,
summarize your own opinions about what one has read or heard and tell them to others,
summarize your own opinions and thoughts in writing using an appropriate style.

From ancient times people have been interested in recording or analyzing past events, thereby giving birth to different traditions of telling history and the development of history as an academic discipline with a strict methodology. Still, people often ignore the conventions of this field when they refer to past events. We must deal with the whole of the past and reveal it based on valid methods, without making choices based simply on what we like. There were always kings, politicians etc. who tried to create a glorious past or hide an inglorious past, to change or use memories of the past for harming others or benefiting themselves. The misuse of history is part of our long history, and it has always been the responsibility of historians to organize/analyze past sources and describe a fair picture of the past.

This course aims to provide a firm understanding about history as an academic discipline, with its general rules and methods, its strengths and limits, while at the same time, gaining an understanding of why a correct or decent understanding of history is (and was) important for us to cope with internal and external problems in our world.

This course focuses on four major themes in Japanese and East Asian history:
(1) Diplomacy and trade;
(2) Disasters and Pandemics;
(3) War and Politics; and,
(4) Territory.
 

Each week the course explores a selection of primary documents related to these themes and key events. The goals of this course are: (1) To think about how and why different people have recorded and written about past historical events; (2) To consider how these events and documents were interpreted by different stakeholders/audiences/winners/losers at the time, and (3) to identify the challenges and limitations faced by historians as we seek to better understand the past, and its relevance for the world we live in today.

 

This is an interdisciplinary class on the relationship between the EU and Japan, focusing on economic aspects but also including political and social aspects. The course comprehensively deals with the history from the beginning of European integration to the establishment of the euro, and the relationship between the EU and Japan and other countries during that process.

In each lecture, Power point will be prepared and uploaded before the lecture. In addition, we rely on the reference books such as 'EU-Japan relations and the crisis of multilateralism' and 'Routledge handbook of the economics of European integration’ for which e-books are available at Keio library and are useful for you to study at home. Students are supposed to submit short comments after every class. European policy makers and academics will be invited for guest speeches occasionally.

This course is designed for students at the advanced level. Based on reading assignments related to Japanese society and culture, students learn various ways to discuss and present their opinions. The course is offered in Spring and Fall semesters with different course content. 

This advanced course prepares students to take courses taught in Japanese. Given clear organization and a solid point of argument, students comprehend long conversations, lectures, debates, and spoken media language, students become able to understand long, abstract texts on a familiar field with the use of dictionaries, write clear and lucid sentences with consistency and coherence in compositions and reports, and firmly distinguish and express facts and opinions separate from each other. Students also improve their ability to speak and perform presentations without producing misunderstanding or bringing a sense of discomfort or tension to the audience.