Waseda University

How does government work? This course focuses on public policy and management, especially on their recent development and on changes in public service delivery under NPM (New Public Management) and NPG (New Public Governance). Through cases of various nation states and local governments, the course discusses main issues about public management, focusing on its historical and theoretical background. Special attention will be paid to centre-periphery relationship and possibility of devolved government. The course also discusses recent topics such as privatization, deregulation, decentralization, devolution and agencification. 

This course investigates various economic issues of South and North Korean economics without serious economic theory. The course covers the economic development differences between North and South Korean economies; the history of both economies after WWII,; trade between North and South Korean economy; each country’s export and import; each economy’s labor market, and each economy’s current situation. For a better understanding of Korean economic issues, the course employs economic concepts like GDP, inflation, unemployment, interest rate, and etc. 

This course provides an outline of the evolutionary history and morphological diversity of fossil reptiles. This class especiallly focuses on the origin, evolution and extinction of major groups such as turtles, crocodiles, marine reptiles, and dinosaurs. Fossil reptiles also include various extinct groups such as mammal-like reptiles and gigantic marine forms (e.g., ichthyosaurs) as well as flying giants (pterosaurs). Reptiles are also important for understanding origin of living birds and ma mammals. Visual instruments and real specimens would be used during the lectures for the aid of comprehension. Preparation of fossil materials would be organized for students in this lecture. Museum excursion or field trip should be organized as optional events on weekends. 

This course is designed for students who have mastered intermediate kanji to expand knowledge of kanji compound words and idiomatic expressions. While examining the structure of kanji compounds, students study kanji systematically by learning opposite and similar meanings of kanji as well as by applying suffixes and prefixes. By expanding their kanji vocabulary, students will be able to select the most appropriate kanji based on the context.

This course introduces the subjects of religion, ritual, and their secular critiques from an anthropological perspective. It studies the history of theory and concepts along a range of ethnographic topics (magic, science, religion and witchcraft; religion and politics, etc). Japan-related subjects will figure occasionally as discussion topics and in possible field trips to sites of religious significance in the Tokyo area. 

Through this physical activity course, students learn about Aikido from the martial arts perspective. The course instructs on mastering basic Aikido techniques while providing insight into Japanese traditional culture and way of thinking. 

This course focuses on the rise of the earth and life sciences as independent, professional disciplines during the modern period, along with ways in which these sciences were developed in industry to produce new technologies. During this period, practitioners in these fields managed to establish their sciences as indispensable to the industrialized nation state, invested with both economic and social capital and productive of significant results, both theoretical and practical. The course traces the development of the earth and life sciences from the Enlightenment period to the development of genetic biotechnologies.

This is a companion course to History of Modern Physical Sciences.

This course approaches media and popular culture as a dynamic field of production, consumption, and contestation. After an initial phase of understanding forms of popular culture, the focus is put primarily on case studies from Japan, along with some comparative examples. This coures examines historical and contemporary meaning-making processes in context, introducing academic vocabulary and approaches while providing tools to examine popular culture and media.  There will also be in-class screenings. By the end of the term, students should be able to think cross-culturally, critically, and collaboratively about not only media and popular culture but also everyday life and the world in which we live.

This course applies economic theory to the study of firms in markets. The study focuses on firm behavior in imperfectly competitive markets, which appear to be far more common than the perfectly competitive markets that were the focus of basic microeconomics courses. It draws on game theory, transaction cost analysis, information theory, and the economic analysis of the law to provide detailed consideration of firm behavior and the goals and effects of government intervention.

Since the first discovery of a planet around the star 51 Pegasi in 1995, about six thousand planets have been discovered outside our solar system. This led to the conclusion that both stars and planets are common in the universe. This course is designed to learn stars and planets and is divided into three sections: Solar System Dynamics; Stellar Structure and Evolution, and Formation of Stars and Planets.