Hitotsubashi University

The course covers the analytical tools and techniques that are necessary to examine a wide variety of fixed income securities and their derivatives. Fixed income securities are financial instruments whose cashflows are fixed and determined in advance. The instruments we cover include treasury and corporate bonds, bond futures, and interest rate swaps. After introducing the notion of yields, duration and convexity, and term structure models, we discuss the evaluation and the risk management of fixed income investments.

The aim of this course is to provide students with the introductory theory of fixed income securities and its applications to the investments. After completing the course, the students will: (i) Be familiar with the basic concepts such as yields, duration and convexity; (ii) Develop and apply the tools for pricing and hedging the fixed income securities; (iii) Understand the theoretical models for the pricing of fixed income securities, and (iv) Master the interest rate derivatives and its applications for hedging and risk management.

This pilot course introduces cutting-edge approaches to analyze and devise responses in relation to conflict and violence, with a particular focus on digital instruments. Students will learn emerging concepts and techniques in various fields, from peacemaking to peacekeeping; peacebuilding; disarmament; human rights, and disaster relief, as well as associated risks and benefits. The course includes active learning elements, whereby students will interact with guest lecturers from the UN, research institutes, and aid groups, while practicing skills for open-source investigation.

This course has two main objectives. The first objective is to understand CSR, CSV and Sustainability based on the theory and the history, and the second objective is to think about what we should do from a corporate perspective to make society and the environment better for our time and the next generation.

The concept of Sustainability is constantly innovating. However, the fundamentals of what a company should do to ensure the sustainable development of the company, society, and the environment remain unchanged. The course aims to unravel the concepts that link corporations with society and the environment, such as CSR, CSV and Sustainability, along with their history. The course also considers what companies should do to improve society for the next generation, citing examples from Japanese and overseas corporations.

Public Economics analyzes the market failure and the function of the government, specifically what the government should do in a market economy. This course covers the basic principle of public economics, especially the role of the government and the rationale for the policy, in a framework of applied microeconomics. The course teaches the standard approach of public economics, which is the foundation of economic analysis in any policy issue. It assumes that students are familiar and comfortable with basic concepts of microeconomics that includes, for example, the method of Lagrange multiplier and Slutsky Equation.

This course gives an overarching view of the different challenges and opportunities of international management, and takes a deep dive into some selected cases and examples. It covers the different layers of complexities that come with business across borders and how companies manage to solve, or gain advantage of, these issues. The course focuses mostly on questions of strategy and organization, rather than issues or activities related to leadership, psychology, operations management or finance/accounting.

This course is for students who have mastered hiragana and katakana, approximately 150 kanji characters, and the first half of beginner-level grammar. It is designed to develop practical skills in the four skills of reading, writing, listening, and speaking Japanese. The class provides many exercises based on situations that students will encounter in their daily lives, aiming to enable students to communicate in Japanese outside of class immediately.

Upon completion of this course, students should be able to:
1. Improve their listening, by understanding simple conversations on topics related to daily life;
2. Improve their speaking, by communicating on everyday situations in Japanese and making short presentations in Japanese;
3. Improve their reading, by reading short texts in hiragana, katakana, and about 195 kanji characters, and
4. Improve their writing, by writing short passages using hiragana, katakana, and kanji characters.

This course is recommended for students who plan to study at Hitotsubashi University for one semester or more, and want to learn Japanese at a slow pace.

This course focuses on a statistical approach of Japanese history. Upon completion of the course, students will have improved their critical understanding of using statistical methods in historical analysis; information extraction from primary historical sources, as well as analysis of historical data with the use of a computer.

This course introduces perspectives on language. It starts with very fundamental questions and assumptions about the nature of language itself and proceed by analyzing basic linguistic structures of the languages course participants know. The course aims to discover that the comparison of languages leads us to linguistic categories some consider universal (same categories in all languages no matter how different they appear to be on the surface), asking the questions: If all languages are more or less alike than why is it so hard to learn a foreign language?  This course considers perspectives from the fields of psychology or anthropology gives us clues, thereby looking at some of the findings the science of language owes to other sciences.

This course is designed to cultivate the basic skills of intermediate-level kanji and vocabulary. Students learn a variety of vocabulary by theme and study the characteristics of kanji, utilizing them to learn new kanji and words. The focus is placed on understanding the meaning of the vocabulary in sentences and accurately understanding the meaning of sentences. Achievable goals for the course include acquisition of N3 level kanji and vocabulary and skills to be discern the reading and meaning of new kanji.

This course introduces local, traditional and/or modern aspects of Japanese culture through field trip visits to cultural heritage sites, museums, and theaters. Special attention is given to comparing one's own culture with that of Japan in discussion with peer students. In addition, students examine how seeing Japanese culture firsthand has impacted their view of Japan.