Keio University

This course focuses on the dynamic implications of the links between the prevailing unprecedented global resource extraction and utilization; high input-high output industrial production, and resource scarcity. This allows one to conceive the relationships between the consequences of overexploitation of resources and irreversible material transformation in the production system, and their crucially important implications for resource efficiency and environmental efficiency.  

This course also seeks to guide students to make mental connections across disciplines with real life experiences based on comprehensive synthesis of evidence of the unsustainable resource consumption and sustainability practices in resource management. Here, it places great emphasis in developing critical thinking and analytical skills among students in identifying policy responses to the economic and environmental effects of overexploitation of natural resources.  

The foregoing takes the class to a broad-spectrum of debates relating to the properties of natural resources; the principles of resource efficiency; resource sustainability and environmental efficiency; environmental impacts of irreversible input-output resource conversions, and sustainable resource consumption and conservation, among other subjects of interest. 

This course is designed for students in the second half of the elementary-level course. It provides an opportunity for students to obtain and practice listening and speaking skills. 

"Anime," "Comic," and "Game" are some of the aggressive and innovative forms of popular culture spreading throughout the world. Japan is one of the major countries influencing this unique popular culture moment so much so that enthusiasts of such popular culture have been called “Otaku.” Otaku also delivers a new sense of atmosphere in terms of "Kawaii" and "Moe." 

“Otaku” cultures have created a transnational cultural boom referred to as “Cool Japan,” creating an inevitable cultural influence. Furthermore, political strategy suggests favorable international competitiveness due to these cultural deliverables, seeds of creativity influencing its national branding.

This course aims to understand how the roots of these Otaku cultural activities in Japan have expanded internationally as one of Simulacra with creators, and activists of the fields: How has the technology created and known its real motivation to drive these sub-cultural activities? This course addresses the backgrounds and characteristics as well as the innovative expansion of “Otaku” culture, which is recognized internationally and born in the age of competing creativity from the Social Darwinism inherent during the phase of its economic growth and development of Japan.