Keio University

This course is intended for students who have already learned the basics of keigo (honorific Japanese). It focuses on developing the communication skills necessary for formal situations, such as in business settings. Students learn how to use keigo appropriately and practice both speaking and listening through dialogues and comprehension exercises.

This course looks at Buddhism in Japan through the actions of Buddhist priests and followers to confront the real life problems and suffering of people in Japan today. The course looks at issues such as human relationships in terms of dying and grieving, alienation, and suicide. It explores economic development in terms of social and economic gaps; aging society; community breakdown and depopulation of the countryside; alternatives to globalization and Buddhist economics, and alternative energy and the environment. The course also surveys politics in terms of nuclear power and peace, and Buddhist complicity with war and work for peace.

The International Management workshop is intended to be a challenging advanced management course for highly motivated undergraduate students. Students will gain a general overview of the process and effect of internationalization in contemporary business, along with an introduction to theories; concepts, and skills relevant to managing effectively in today’s global environment, with a special focus on Japanese firms. Students will be challenged to integrate knowledge they have gained from this workshop and from other courses and apply their accumulated knowledge to business case studies and a group research project. Students will engage in analytical problem-solving related to managing in the international environment and will frequently be called upon to brief their findings to the class. In addition, students will conduct a research project in small groups to resolve ongoing global issues. The topics of these team-based projects will be confirmed before the fifth workshop session.

Modern Japanese literature is filled with ghosts and goblins--if only you know where to look. This course is designed as an introduction to the strangest, scariest, and wildest fiction in modern Japan, meaning that no prior knowledge of Japanese literature or Japanese history is required. The course begins at the "beginning" of modern Japanese literature in the late nineteenth century up to contemporary works and explores a range of ghost stories, fairy tales, as well as the literary equivalent of the splatter film. The course explores the following questions: How did the broad genre of today's gensō bungaku (roughly corresponding to supernatural, horror, and fantasy genres) emerge and develop as a set of assumptions about the nature of modern life in Japan? How do these assumptions challenge our way of interacting with the world, with other people, and ultimately with our own sense of self? What kind of new understandings of various boundaries--between the real and the unreal, the present and the past, the foreign and the native, the living and the dead--might these stories suggest? And how are these texts part of a larger global network of weird fiction--what, in other words, does it mean to call a Japanese text "Gothic"?