Asian Studies

Since ancient times, people have traveled to sacred places in search of sacred power, listened to the legends of these places and the miraculous experiences of the gods and Buddha. Particularly in the Middle Ages, engi-e, paintings of the origins and history of a temple or shrine, which glorified miraculous experiences and visualized the stories of the gods and Buddha; and pilgrimage mandalas, which skillfully depicted the past and present of sacred places, were actively produced, and were sometimes displayed in front of people. This course discusses religious paintings such as engi-e and pilgrimage mandalas, as well as related stories and legends, to decipher the beliefs in sacred places and the stories that support them. The course aims to acquire the ability to read narrative pictures while exploring the origins of power spots that attract even modern people and the spiritual culture of the Japanese people, and examining methods of picturing sacred places and the specific aspects of faith.

Students focus on contemporary forms and practices of Malay families and households, the underlying concepts in family studies, and prevalent notions of the Malay family and household. A major focus is the changing nature of Malay family and household structures and their diverse forms. Students analyze the dynamic social relationships in households from different perspectives. The course explores how Malay families design family styles in a context of changing societies and is targeted for students interested in family studies.

What is the Chinese poetry? Why is it called “shige (literally, song-word)”? How does it imagine a lyrical way to express the individual feelings or the collective narrations about the body, life, nature and the universe of the Chinese people? Through a cross-cultural perspective, this course is intended to help foreign students understand, appreciate and experience the beauty of classical Chinese poetry, especially its unique tradition of musicality. This is a taught course over 16 weeks through the spring term. Class time will consist of lectures, poetry readings, seminars, discussions, with a workshop and a poetry recital where appropriate. Students are asked to join all the activities.

The course will lead you to explore Shijing (The Book of Songs) & The Lyrics of Chuci (The Lyrics of Chu) in pre-Qin peroid, Yuefu (Music Bureau Poems) in the Han Dynasty, “Nineteen Old Poems”, Shi Poetry in the Tang Dynasty, Ci Poetry in the Song Dynasty, and Qu Poetry in the Yuan Dynasty.

The course creatively combines poetic criticism with poetry performance by integrating the theoretical methods of Chinese poetics, musicology and vocal performance. The course aims to help students enjoyably and engagingly overcome language and cultural barriers, to experience the charm and the profundity of the Chinese language and culture by reciting and chanting the classical Chinese poems.

This undergraduate lecture course is designed to survey major topics of the international relations of the People’s Republic of China with a specific focus on Chinese perspective. With a brief introduction of major theoretical perspective on foreign policy studies, the main body of the course is organized around special topics of Chinese foreign policies, including the Chinese historical legacy and its impact on China’s foreign policy, nationalism and public opinion in contemporary China, mechanism of China’s foreign-policy decision-making, leaders and their styles, China’s attitudes towards global governance, the economic dimension of China’s interactions with the outside world, public diplomacy and China’s soft power and China’s policy towards peripheral countries, (in particular, the Northeast Asia and the South China Sea). This course pays attention to the application of different international relations theories to the problems under study. The course aims to acquaint students with knowledge of China’s involvement in world affairs in historical and contemporary perspectives and train them with an analytical understanding of the dynamics of China’s foreign policy.

The history of modern China is deeply intertwined with international law. Starting from the early 19th century, the European-originated international law made its way to the China-centered East Asian tributary system through military conquests and treaties. Over the past two centuries, international law has profoundly shaped the transformation of China in terms of building of a modern state and the national identity. The more recent decades have seen China’s increasingly active engagement with international law in terms of dispute settlement and treaty negotiation. Yet international law is still underappreciated in understanding China’s foreign relations, often being reduced to no more than legalistic cover for realpolitik by international relations scholars. Academic research on China’s foreign policy is largely devoid of serious legal analysis into China’s engagement with international law. This course sits at the intersection of international law and international relations and bears four goals in mind. First of all, the course prepares the students for understanding the fundamental concepts of international law. The second objective is to examine China’s initial encounter with the Eurocentric concepts and practices of international law and its lingering legacy. Third, it aims for surveying China’s contemporary engagement with various international legal regimes in a historical and contextualized way. Rather than highlighting China’s uniqueness in the international legal system, the course encourages comparative inquiries into China’s position on and practices of international law. Last, the course invites the students to empirically re-examine popular impressionistic discourses about China and international law by making extensive use of primary sources and incorporating competing perspectives.

This course must be taken simultaneously with CONTEMPORARY JAPANESE ECONOMY A. The course addresses important economic problems that emerged in Japan within the last few decades and aims to deepen understanding of contemporary Japanese economy and its relations to the world economy. It covers the following topics: the Bubble Economy in the 1980s, Recovery in the 2000s, Aging society, Social security, etc.

This course examines the main issues of Southeast Asian security, giving due attention to traditional concerns with interstate conflict as well as non-traditional themes like the economy and the quality of democratic governance. It also provides a grounding in the Cold War-era conflicts that shaped the region as we know it today. The central focus, however, is on contemporary internal armed conflict rooted in processes of state formation and state decay (for instance, ethnic conflict in Myanmar, separatist violence in Indonesia or the attempts to create an autonomous region in Muslim Mindanao in the Philippines). Key internal conflicts affecting the human security of millions of Southeast Asians, as well as near neighbors like Australia, will be analyzed in their unique historical and cultural context, and related to cross-cutting questions with broad inter-disciplinary significance negotiating views from above and below, from inside and outside. 

This course examines the transformation of identity in Hong Kong through the analysis of the tropes of crises, home, and “border-crossing” in contemporary Hong Kong literary, filmic and other cultural texts. It explores how various crucial moments of transition in Hong Kong history have produced identity crises in the people of Hong Kong. Some of these intriguing moments include the communist takeover in 1949, the 1997 handover, as well as more recently the SARS outbreak, the urban redevelopment debates, and other current issues. It will also explore the possibility of understanding one’s sense of self/selves through the various practices of writing Hong Kong. It discusses critically the relation between nation and home, self and other, the individual and the collective, memory and forgetting to critique the cultural problems bound up in a space of flows called “Hong Kong.”

This course introduces Japan’s global political and security role, starting with the pre-1945 and Cold War era legacies, and then focuses on the Post-Cold-War era. It examines Japan’s shift from security isolationism during the Cold War to security engagement, its championing of regional multilateralism in East Asia, its emergence as a global power in development aid, its contributions to UN peacekeeping and non-traditional security in areas such as humanitarian and disaster relief (HaDR), counter-piracy, maritime security, and counter-pandemic measures. It focuses on Japan’s relationships with the US, China, Korea, ASEAN, and Europe, and considers how Japan’s foreign policy institutions, including those making security and development aid policy, have changed during the Abe administration. The course concludes with a summary looking at Japan’s trajectory as a middle power.