Waseda University

This basic Japanese course is designed to improve speaking skills. A different theme concerning Japanese culture and society is chosen for each course and students are split into groups to engage in activities, discussion, and group work concerning the selected topic. The overall goal of the class is for students to widen their perspectives and deepen their knowledge regarding various issues related to Japan and Japanese society. Meeting three times a week, the program offers various theme courses and students may take multiple sections.  

This advanced Japanese course choses a different theme concerning Japanese culture and society to discuss each week. Students are split into groups to engage in activities, discussion, and group work concerning the selected topic. The goal of the class is for students to widen their perspectives and deepen their knowledge regarding various issues related to Japan and Japanese society. The program offers various theme courses and students may take multiple sections.

The course introduces a variety of concepts and theories to analyze global governance, with a focus on organizations and institutions including international and regional organizations, firms, and NGOs. Course materials discuss topics from international relations, political science, economics, sociology, and anthropology. Substantively, the course covers diverse issues such as security, development, and science.   

Drawing on the seminar style, the course requires each person to contribute through discussion, presentation, and a written research proposal on topics of their choice.   

This advanced Japanese course is designed to improve reading skills. A theme concerning Japanese culture and society is chosen for each course and students are split into groups to engage in activities, discussion, and group work concerning the selected topic. The goal of the class is for students to widen their perspectives and deepen their knowledge regarding various issues related to Japan and Japanese society. The program offers various theme courses and students may take multiple sections. 

This is an intermediate English Historical Linguistics course which should be taken after studying the basics of linguistics offered in CO201 Introduction to Language Studies and/or CO202 Introduction to English Linguistics at this school or anything equivalent to these anywhere.  

Building on the knowledge from these introductory courses, this course investigates the internal linguistic development of the English language from a synthetic to an analytic language, i.e. loss of inflections, depending on a more fixed word order, and emerging periphrases and function words such as auxiliaries and prepositions in constructing sentences. It also delves into the external influences on the English language throughout its history, namely, lexical borrowings from Greek, Latin (Classical and Medieval), Old Norse, and (Norman-)French words. 

The course first studies selected features of pronunciation, spelling, and grammar of English from its earliest stage of development. It also considers the cultural, social, and political aspects of the external history of English, especially in terms of vocabulary.  

By the end of the course one will have understood why the English language has become the lingua franca of the world but, for many speakers of it, whether native or non-native, ‘”English is among the easiest languages to speak badly, but the most difficult to use well’ (C. L. Wrenn, The English Language, 1977, p.9). 

This is an advanced-level Data Science course, focusing on deep learning, which has witnessed great success over the past decade. Two of the most successful fields of deep learning are image processing and natural language processing. 

Some of the most successful applications of deep learning in image processing include object detection, image segmentation, and image classification. In natural language processing, deep learning has been used to develop applications such as machine translation, text classification, automatic summarization and question answering.  

The course begins with an overview of deep learning, and a review class for Python and the PyTorch library respectively. Then, the course studies linear algebra and calculus from numerical perspectives. The course also reviews the basics of statistics and information theory for deep learning and the basics of machine learning, including topics like overfitting, supervised and unsupervised learning, and stochastic gradient descent.  

The course introduces neural network models using the familiar linear and softmax regression, as well as the concept of multilayer perceptrons and the essential technique of backward propagation.  The course also studies various ways to regularize deep neural networks, such as putting norm penalties or allowing dropout, and how to do optimization for training these regularized deep neural networks. The latter half of the course focuses on convolutional neural networks for image processing and recurrent and recursive neural networks for natural language processing. Last, the recent important topic of fine-tuning a pre-trained large language model will also be covered. 

What does it mean to exert, obey, resist, or think power? How does political power relate to violence and authority? What is the relationship between secular and religious notions of power? In inviting students to reflect upon these questions through a wide range of texts and classroom dynamics, this course explores the concept of political power and its multiple forms of expression, thus introducing critical theory, political thinking, and the global humanities. Topics include imperialism and colonialism; democracy; sovereignty; the relationship between intellectuals and power; feminist and revolutionary perspectives on power; critical, pedagogical, and aesthetic approaches to political power relations. 

Postmodernism is a philosophical-cultural movement of the late twentieth century that permeated many fields. This course defines postmodernism and discusses its characteristics, focusing on postmodernism in art and culture, literature, philosophy and history.  

The course discusses the following materials: 

1) The Beatles' "The Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band" and other musical songs and albums;  

2) John Barth's "The Lost in the Funhouse" and other postmodernist stories;  

3) Jacques Derrida's philosphical notion of Deconstruction, plus theories based on deconstruction;  

4) Holocaust films (e.g. "The Shoah" and "Schindler's List") and literature;  

5) Dinh Q. Le's installation art;  

6) Yoko Ono's experimental art;  

7) American films such as "The Truman Show" & "Edward Scissorhands";  

8) Others. 

This course requires two years of prior Japanese language study. The course explores Japanese with the goal of improving comprehensive skills toward advanced level. Students examine various themes such as proper grammatical structures, kanji, vocabulary, and situations described through readings. Through discussion and presentation about various themes, students develop a proficiency that enables them to communicate with native speakers actively on common daily topics. 

This class is designed for students with no prior knowledge of Chinese characters and wish to start learning kanji and/or to establish solid foundation for learning kanji. The class covers kanji components, how to use and write kanji, and basic kanji words. At the completion of the course, students will be able to comprehend basic kanji in context.