International Christian University

This course aims to help students gain a foundation in spoken and written Japanese for academic purposes through topics on society and culture. The target level is CEFR B1.2. Prerequisite: “J4:Japanese” or equivalent. Ten class hours/week. 

By the end of the course, students will be able to:
express, understand, or interact with others on a variety of familiar social subjects or slightly abstract contents if the argument is not delivered in complex structure and the development of the argument is clear, and
speak and write appropriately according to the situation.

This course explores how the current global framework of sustainable development, particularly within the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and Russian Aggression in Ukraine as well as other conflicts in the world, play on the implementation of SDGs. It also studies how sustainable development has evolved in the global development discussion. The course aims to instruct students on various aspects of sustainable development and key global environmental issues, including how to work towards a more sustainable society.

This course is an introduction to the study of East Asian Art. Each lecture features representative works created from the ancient to pre-modern era of East Asia, particularly of China and Korea. The aims to acquire basic knowledge of East Asian art from art historical points of view, and learning the practical skills of studying and making own presentations about East Asian Art.
 

Although this course refers to some relationships on visual art between the continent and Japan, the course will not emphasize Japanese art.  Those who intend to study Japanese art are recommended to take ARC211 and ARC212 (History of Japanese Art I and II), then take this course before or after then.

This course examines the history and development of cultural studies in different social contexts. Cultural studies examine how we have become who we are; how the rules governing our cultures are constructed; and how we, as social beings, live in society. This course outlines the historical formation of cultural studies and introduces key concerns and theoretical perspectives in the field. Specifically, the course focuses on the way in which popular culture and media are associated with these issues. 

This course introduces basic references and debates of cultural studies and helps students to consider how the social world and our everyday lives are associated with key concerns of cultural studies. The main (but not exclusive) topics include: 

- What Culture and cultural studies are about
- The emergence of cultural studies as a discipline (in the UK, the US and Japan)

- Mass culture vs. popular culture

- The Frankfurt School and the culture industry

- The politics of popular culture

- Why class, race, and gender matter

- Celebrity culture in the mediated world

- Fandom and identity

This course introduces the sociology of work. It is designed to provide an overview while also focusing on selected topics in greater depth. Topics covered include: the nature of work as a social construct; the historical dimension of work in different societies and times; classical theories of Marx, Weber and Durkheim; competing viewpoints of modern organization of work; social stratification of class, gender, race, and ethnicity; unpaid domestic labor; the technical aspects of work; the changing nature of work in the post-industrial knowledge economy, and the meaning of work in contemporary postmodern consumer societies. Please note that this course is reading, writing, and speaking intensive. The instructor also assigns frequent group work, with the expectation of fostering group members to engage in frequent conversation and grasp abstract concepts together.

Anthropology, at its core, is the study of humans and humanity in various times and places, and the ways that they make sense of and engage with their world. This course introduces students to anthropology as a discipline, specifically socio-cultural anthropology, through an exploration of various peoples and cultures and the similarities and differences that make us who we are. The course addresses what it means to be human and how to think anthropologically through the study of different cultures ranging from indigenous peoples across Africa, the Americas, and the Pacific, to modern cultures in Europe, North America, and Japan.

By the end of this course, students will be able to:
1) Develop and demonstrate a basic understanding of anthropology as a discipline, diverse cultures throughout the world, and some key anthropological concepts and methods.
2) Learn to critically read, interpret, and summarize anthropological texts.

3)  Learn how to investigate cultures, including their own, and interpret and analyze them using anthropological concepts.
4) Develop and practice core academic skills, such as critical reading, thought, and analysis, academic writing, and verbal communication.

This course introduces the psychology of language which explores the relationship between the human mind and language. It aims to gain insights into the way in which the configuration of the human mind shapes language. It is concerned with how the cognitive system processes language and tries to provide accounts for it in terms of cognitive models based on experimental data. This course covers the following topics: language and the brain; language acquisition; animal communication and language; origin of language; representation of linguistic information in memory; sentence processing, and text comprehension.