Hitotsubashi University

This course offers a comparative, transnational study of the dramatic social, scientific, political, and cultural transformations that occurred in the two decades or so following World War II. By focusing on Japan's global moment in the 1960s, it includes some of the following topics: the Cold War and the Space Race, the reshaping of the Middle-East, the Cultural Revolution in China, decolonization in Africa, dictatorship and Liberation Theology in Latin America, the global civil rights movement, the New Right, the environmental movement, consumerism, counter-culture and the student protest movements that took place around the world.
 

This course examines multiple contexts of the Global Sixties in the collective efforts to map out the simultaneity of revolutionary transformation and conflict, while developing a methodological approach for researching and interpreting change from a variety of national/local perspectives. It particularly focuses on the travels of individuals who saw themselves as part of an international community of antiwar activists and antiracism causes.

This class also examines how actual interactions among people from Japan and other Third World countries inspired transnational identities and multiracial coalitions, challenging the political commitments and personal relationships of individual activists.

This course focuses on the modern socioeconomic history of agriculture in China and the relationships between rural and urban; farm and industry; traditional and modern, and communism and capitalism.

The course aims to:

1. Understand the political economy of a non-industrial and non-western social system.
2. Learn how to distinguish between historical facts and present values.
3. Learn how to make meaningful comparisons between different societies and economies.

This course covers topics that are ethically questioned in business and consumption. It consists of lectures and exercises where all participants are expected to engage in discussion.

Students discuss ethical issues in business and consumption. The course aims to:
-Understand principles and rules that determine ‘right’ and ‘wrong;'
-Understand the decision-making process and influencing factors in the context of business and consumption practices; and  
-Consider implications to oneself as a practitioner and an individual consumer. 

Topics covered in the course include:
• Introduction to ethics in business and consumption – What is ethics in marketplace? What is the ‘responsibility’ of marketers and consumers, and to whom?  
• Ethical theories and principles – What makes it ‘right’?
• Ethical decision-making – How do we make decisions?
• Ethical and sustainability issues in business and consumption
• Notions of 'social responsibility' and ‘sustainability’

This course aims to highlight the importance of communication with stakeholders and an understanding of public relations methods. The course utilizes various media to acquire basic knowledge of effective public relations.

Communication is the key to any organization’s success. With the diversification of societal needs and business environment, it is crucial for companies to implement an effective public relations strategy as part of their management strategy and to build a trust-based relationship with stakeholders. For effective public relations/corporate communications, companies need to understand mass media and social media, with the latter receiving considerable attention from the business world as a direct and fast-acting communication channel with their high-priority stakeholders.

 

This is an introductory course tracing the genealogy of Western masters who established sociology over the past 100 years or so, from Durkheim, Weber to Baudrillard, Goffman, and Bourdieu. It oversees their research, theory and thoughts, providing students to gain a three-dimensional understanding of the constant interrelationships between society and sociology throughout history.

The purpose of this course is to provide students with a basic understanding of the transformation of the Japanese economy in the late early-modern and modern times, while at the same time acquiring a multifaceted view of historical facts. The course introduces the characteristics of the transformation process of the Japanese economy in the late early modern period and the modern period (19th century to 20th century). In addition to macroscopic perspectives such as industry, distribution, and trade structures, the course also focuses on microscopic perspectives such as the way people worked and lived at the time and the transformation of society.

This course analyzes a selection of works by Western writers and film directors from 1990s to the present, with the exception of Ishiguro’s short story) which are set in East Asia and/or contain characters from East Asia. It explores the answers to the following central questions: Is the portrayal of East Asian people and cultures in each of these works fairly accurate, or is it conforming to biased existing discourses? Are there correct and incorrect ways to present East Asia in literary and cinematic works?

The course aims to apply logical reasoning to our examinations of racial and cultural issues and to learn to think for ourselves, instead of allowing existing discourses to think for us.

Recently, deep leaning has been the successful tool for various tasks of data analysis. Also, the theoretical structure of deep neural network (DNN) has been clarified gradually. On the other hand, such theoretical structure is crucially based on elementary linear algebra. Thus it is worth studying machine learning from scratch, that is, elementary linear algebra. Upon completion of the course, students will be able to understand topics on machine learning including elementary deep neural network and reservoir computing.

This course explores different aspects of the relationship between language and economy, looking at the economic value of language; the linguistic side of the economy, and how the relationship between economic and linguistic forces help shapes today's global world. 

The aim of this lecture is to familiarize students with the various methods of media research (both quantitative and qualitative) and their theoretical backgrounds. Students may already know (and be using) some of the methods and theories, but this course aims to enlighten them of other approaches as well as the strengths and weaknesses of the various methods.

The course includes engagement with videos about media research methods as well as discussion of recent articles from media and communication journals. Students will be expected to introduce each article in class to facilitate the discussion. Students will gain an understanding of the different kinds of media research methods, as well as when, how and why they were developed. This is not a practical course so students will not be taught how to use particular methods, but this course should help them make a more informed choice of research methods for their own projects.