Waseda University

This course explores a nuanced understanding of The Pensées of Blaise Pascal while deepening one's knowledge of French Thought and Religion. The course also covers its Reception History, exploring various themes related to Life, Humanity, and Religion, while encouraging students to express their own existential reflections.

This course teaches public finance at its introductory level. The course covers topics ranging from normative issues, such as why and how we need the government to intervene in the market economy, and how it intervenes in the economy in reality. An understanding of the recent controversy about the burden of the national debt and the fiscal situation of the Japanese central government is expected by the end of the course.

Required course prerequisite: Basic understanding of introductory microeconomics and macroeconomics. 

This class surveys premodern Japanese art, looking at painting, sculpture, architecture, and material culture--particularly those related to Buddhism, kami worship, and Buddha-kami combinatory practices.

This course is an introduction to political communication. After an overview of the history of media effects theories, the lecture addresses the major issues of political communication in contemporary politics. The lecture not only introduces students to U.S.-based political communication research, but also develops an academic perspective on real-life political communication by connecting it to current issues in East Asia. In addition, the class will practice using the theories and models introduced in the sessions to analyze political phenomena. 

History books are a prime source to understanding current events as a result of the past. Yet even though every historian purports to present facts in an objective manner, the argument is necessarily the outcome of the author’s own interpretation of the material available to him. This seminar develops critical thinking through engagement with different forms of historiography and teaches how to form an independent judgment of a text, with or without previous background knowledge of the subject matter. Each class session consists of reading and discussing an excerpt from a history booik or a text to understand argument, source work and intent of the author. By placing each text within the context of its time, the class will be prompted to consider objectivity or potential bias in a text and what one can learn from it.

This course introduces students to a systematic treatment of marketing on an international and global scale, describing concepts relevant to international marketers. The course is developed along two basic dimensions—the cultural environment of international/global marketing and the management of international/global marketing operations. The emphasis is on the strategic implications of marketing in different cultures.　
 

This course helps students enhance their understanding of the contemporary global economy, where Russia has been striving to reshape the formats and frameworks of its interaction with the world despite international sanctions. The course may interest students aiming to deepen their knowledge of Russian Studies. Ideally, it can be taken as a follow-up to the Introductory Course to Russian Studies, although this is not a prerequisite.

This course teaches the theory of political economics, a recently growing area in the field of economics, in which economic theory and game theory are applied to understand political-economic phenomena. 

Course Prerequisites: The lecture assumes that participants have a basic knowledge of microeconomics and game theory at the introductory level. Some algebra, such as differentiation and optimization, will be required.

This course provides opportunities for students to learn Japanese vocabulary, grammar and conversation that are useful in university life. Participants are expected to express what they want to say in basic Japanese; learn about Japanese language culture and values, and expand their world through learning Japanese language. This class offers blended learning: a self-directed learning (SDL) session in which students are required to learn individually using online materials (equivalent to one 100 min period/ week), and a real time session (Zoom) in a classroom with other students (one 100-min period/ week).  

This is an intermediate-level course on data science with a focus on machine learning methods and algorithms using Python. First, the course introduces the big picture of machine learning using various examples, while teaching techniques of how to do data visualization for various types of data, a very important subfield of machine learning. The course also addresses decision tree learning; learning linear separators; logistic regression; generalization and overfitting; model selection and regularization; linear regression; ensemble learning; unsupervised learning; neural network models, and principal component analysis. 

The course also covers prediction and classification tasks using artificial neural networks and deep neural network models, and how to inrperet the results of accurate but black-box machine learning algorithms. A thorough treatment of deep learning is covered through an advanced course, Advanced Data Science.