International Christian University

This course aims to deepen students' understanding of the United States by exploring diverse topics through an interdisciplinary approach.

The topics and materials covered in class includes historical events; traditional concepts rooted in the nation's founding ideals; a wide range of famous and lesser-known works of American literature, and even the lyrics of 1930s blues. All of these are relevant to contemporary America. Furthermore, this course encourages students to develop an interest in and critically explore racial issues in the United States, particularly in the ongoing era of the Black Lives Matter movement.

 

This is an advanced course in psychological statistics. The objective of the course is to gain knowledge of multivariate statistics especially non-experimental, cross-sectional data. The course covers how to select, conduct, interpret, and report quantitative statistical analyses to help answer research questions that involve multiple dependent variables. Students are expected to have taken PSY104 and PSY223. R and R Studio will be used as main statistical packages. 

This course studies significant Christian theological works by Americans, paying careful attention both to their contributions to Christian theology and to their context within the United States. One theme that emerges repeatedly, although certainly not the only important theme, is the question of what makes one a “true Christian." The course covers topics such as: Revivals and the First Great Awakening; the Holiness Movement and the Second Great Awakening; the Bible, the Civil War, and white Christian debates about slavery; the Social Gospel; the Fundamentalist-Modernist controversy and Pentecostalism; the World Wars and American power; American power, American oppression and liberation theology, and American culture and Christianity. 

This course examines Japanese schooling from sociological and comparative perspectives. The first section focuses on the socializing role of schooling. What kind of values and skills are learned in Japanese schooling? How do they differ from other societies? How do they change from preschool to high school? The second section focuses on the sorting mechanism of schooling. To what extent is Japanese education system an egalitarian system, in terms of social class or gender, when compared with other OECD countries? How do countries differ in their conceptualization or educational equality or mechanism of stratification? The last section addresses some recent educational reforms that have been widely debated in Japan.

After providing a comprehensive overview of Korean history from ancient times to the modern era, this course focuses on the Joseon Dynasty (1392–1910) and examines its historical characteristics in terms of politics, society, and economy. Building on this understanding, the course seeks to gain insight into Korea’s traditional culture and society within East Asia, as well as the challenges of modernization. 

This course provides an overview of international trade, the movement of goods and services across national boundaries, while developing analytic tools that can be used to analyze world economic policy debates. This course is aimed at students interested in the dynamics around exports, imports and related economic policies. 

This course explores fundamental questions on law: What is the nature of law? What is the relation between law and morality or other norms? What is justice? The course critically analyzes selected readings and discusses the key questions in the philosophy of law.

The creation and implementation of public policy is fundamentally political. Every policy, whether it be economic, social, about health and wealth, or security, comes at the end of a political calculation. The leaders and bureaucrats who write, pass, and enforce public policies operate within political environments that shape and constrain their behavior. The study of public policy, then, is the study of optimal public policy, taking seriously the mitigating effects of the political process. This course is designed to introduce you to this area of study and practice. 

The first half of the course explores the main issues and theoretical frameworks within the field of public policy while developing methods in which to analyze, explain, and predict such phenomena (e.g. assessing the probability that a government provides programmatic as opposed to particularistic goods). The second half of the course utilizes these tools with which to understand actual policy in Japan, going through topics such as the politics behind budget processes; energy politics in light of the 3/11 disaster; constitutional change, and Japan's response to the COVID pandemic. 

This course covers the basic concepts of information science. The first part of the course focuses on how information is represented and stored in binary numbers, characters, images, music and sound, as well as information compression techniques. Next, the class learns the basic concepts of information processing and gains an understanding of logical operations, memory and circuits such as half adder and full adder. The course then focuses on the building blocks of a computer - CPU, RAM, secondary memory and input/output - and covers file systems and operating systems (OS). Finally, students learn about the basics of the internet / artificial intelligence and gain an understanding of concepts related to the transmission of information.

This course explores the relationship between the history, culture, animals, and physical environment of Japan over the twentieth century, particularly topics often overlooked in history, such as forests, mines, pollution, animals, birds, and protest. The course covers important events, issues and texts related to the environmental history of modern Japan.