Waseda University

This introductory course focuses on learning characters and pronunciation, while also studying basic grammar through simple daily conversations.

This course studies the history of English literature, exploring key texts from each literary period, and examines English literary texts from cultural and social perspectives. In particular, the course analyzes literary classics such as Beowulf and works by Geoffrey Chaucer, William Shakespeare, John Milton, Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, Mary Shelley, Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, Oscar Wilde, E. M. Forster, Virginia Woolf and Kazuo Ishiguro, situating them in their cultural and social contexts.

This course provides a historical and analytical approach to international relations between Japan, Spain and Latin America.  It reflects on the evolution of international relations, as well as their state of affairs today, and their potential projection in the future.

The international community has become more globalized - increasingly become more interdependent and enhancing opportunities for people to acknowledge their common humanity across arbitrarily drawn political borders and cultural divides. What does the term "globalization" really mean? How does it affect our lives? This course explains the various dimensions of globalization: cultural, economic, political and ecological. It also discusses the positive and negative effects of globalization as well as its future outlook.

This course introduces selected Japanese masterpieces in the hand-scroll (emaki ) format from the late-classical and medieval periods, while referencing other types of narrative imagery. The course considers how scholars approach these images from a variety of perspectives; how historical developments shape images and are reshaped by them, and visual storytelling techniques.

Constitutionalism is an idea that governmental power should be restrained by fundamental law. Many countries possess a written constitutional code, which is often seen as the fundamental law. This course examines how the idea of constitutionalism emerged in Japan and what it means today. The course also compares the Japanese constitution with constitutional law from other countries. 

This course analyzes the concepts and phenomena of cultural encounters and border-crossings in Spanish American societies, mainly through some of the fundamental works that were produced in the 20th and 21st centuries. The course examines where and how one can observe the phenomena and processes of cultural encounters and border-crossings in the texts while exploring the meaning of each aspect of these phenomena within a specific socio-historical and political context.

The course contemplates the following key questions: How does a culture travel and encounter another? How does it change its shape upon encountering other cultures? Is it possible to have the concept of a return to “the original” point of departure or the concept of “authenticity"?

This course teaches the basics of programming as part of the field of informatics. Programming is used in many areas today, such as software development, automation, and data analysis, so understanding its fundamentals is very important. This course discusses algorithms, data structures, and control flow, and provides opportunities to practice coding, debugging, and basic software design. The course aims to build a solid foundation in programming that supports future learning and career growth.

This course approaches gastronomy as a source of history, social practices, and public diplomacy. This course reflects on the limits and potential partiality of cultural diplomacy initiatives. Taking examples in South America as case studies, the course explores the role of gastronomy as a tool of soft power for the promotion of national images, their limitations and the potential role of gastronomy to raise awareness on history, society and cultural diversity. Thus, this course treats gastronomy as a means of communication and sustainable development that can promote human security.

This interactive lecture-based course seeks to identify what it is people mean when they invoke the term "culture." It critiques "culture" in different contexts to examine whether it is a defensible position to justify the activities of different actors, while examining our own position, critique it, then develop a defensible stance that defines and understands culture/s. Students consider how culture is transmitted, how it evolves, the different values it promotes, whether culture has boundaries, and critique the concepts of gender and nationality in culture.

The course focuses on: 1) Identity, considering how culture/s use tools to create and maintain individual and group identity; (2) Cultural Legitimacy, where the ideas of cultural relativism, consumerism (Pop v Mass) are addressed; (3) Language, examining how cultures utilize the media and discourse to reinforce values; (4) Taboo, wherein the class critiques real world contemporary examples that may challenge one's values, ethics and morality; (5) Reflection on the way human brains process and make sense of the information in the worlds society creates, and (6) technologies, through application to contemporary and future societies.