Waseda University

This course explores various aspects of classical and early medieval Japan by listening to different voices recorded in historical and literary sources. The sessions alternate in focus: first, the sessions discuss the history of a particular time or topic and then explore related literary works. The course expands one's perspective and reshapes their understanding of Japanese history as a complex and nonlinear process.

Korean II is for students who have completed Korean I. In this course, students will learn advanced verb endings, classifiers, and different verbal modifiers. Each lesson is divided into four sections: (1) Basic Dialogue (2) Explaining Vocabulary (3) Learning Grammar Patterns and Spoken/Written Practice Questions, and (4) Utilization which focuses on application of grammar patterns and the dialogues.

This course covers issues involved in global environmental changes and introduces system thinking, which is used in natural and social sciences. The course covers the following topics: 

1: Global Change: Overview
2: System Diagram
3: Daisyworld
4: Global Energy Balance
5: The Atmospheric Circulation System
6: The Circulation of the Oceans
7: The Carbon Cycle
8: Long-Term Climate Regulation
9: Faint Young Sun Paradox, Early Earth
10: Short-Term Climate Variability
11: Global Warming and An Inconvenient Truth
12: Kepler and Milankovitch
13: Ozone Depletion

There are two limits to our sustainable economic growth: one is the limited capacity of the natural environment to receive waste and the other is the limited quantity of non-renewable energy and resources. This course provides an overview of the status quo and policy solution to those limits. The first part of the course discusses the data and policy examples of environmental problems. The latter part discusses the reason why these environmental problems occur as well as how to solve these problems in terms of economics. 

Required Prerequisites: Basic Microeconomics and Basic Macroeconomics.

This course aims to fill gaps in management education with respect to business and the natural environment by introducing pressing environmental issues confronting business today and providing effective tools for understanding and addressing these challenges. 

This course is a Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) course in English and Korean to explore Korean history in the 20th century with a focus on disasters, accidents, and crises. In the 20th century, the world, including Korea, experienced imperialism, colonization and war, and after many countries were liberated, experienced the Cold War. This course covers various disasters, accidents and crises in Korea before achieving rapid capitalist industrialization and democratization. Class lectures and communication are in Korean, with readings in both English and Korean to achieve the goal of the CLIL course.

This course explores Japanese literature written in the wake of World War II, focusing on how writers grappled with the profound disruptions of defeat, occupation, memory, and reconstruction. Spanning from the immediate postwar period to contemporary works, class readings include short stories, novels, memoirs, essays, and manga by authors such as Dazai Osamu, Sakaguchi Ango, Ota Yoko, Enchi Fumiko, Oe Kenzaburo, and Kono Fumiyo. The course also considers broader historical and cultural contexts through critical texts such as John Dower’s Embracing Defeat, and extend the inquiry into diasporic and transnational perspectives by reading works by Min Jin Lee and Kim Tal-su.

The course examines how literature reflects and interrogates key themes of the postwar condition—survival, trauma, gender and power, the legacy of imperialism, and the tension between memory and forgetting. Some knowledge of Japanese literature is preferred but not required.  

This course explores the governance and political development of the European Union (EU).  It emphasizes the EU’s unique and complex system of governance and its efforts toward policy innovation with focus on its historical development, driving factors, and crisis responses.

This course explores “Mechanism Design, ”is an active research field in economic theory. Mechanism design is an emerging economic theory focused on designing institutions to effectively influence people's behavior. It serves as the foundation for social implementation by addressing social issues through the design of social rules. This course focuses on the challenges and innovations in social implementation based on this theory. Moreover, by applying mechanism design theory, the class gains insights into generating collective Intelligence through the aggregation of people’s decentralized evaluations.

Some math (like calculus) is required, while the necessary math is explained during lectures.

This course explores various social and cultural issues in Korea through reading and discussing Korean-language books and articles published in contemporary Korea. The course focuses on literature, essays,and academic texts on topics such as overseas Koreans; social and cultural discrimination; modern history, and the daily lives of workers in Korea. The course also aims to improve Korean language skills at the academic level. 

All course materials are in Korean.