Asian Studies

This course examines a variety of anime movies and television series featuring problems of the city, urban design, ruins, environment, and ecology as a central theme and as a source of creative inspirations. The course examines Akira, Patlabor, Ghost in the Shell, Nausicaä, Psycho-Pass, and Your Name.

The course closely analyzes and discusses each animation work (narrative, world-setting,audio-visual style, etc.) but also a wide range of critical texts on anime, urban space, environment, and ruins. This course examines why anime is an important cultural text, and what socio-political, philosophical, and ethical issues they often raise for further critical thinking.

The course addresses the history, current state, and future of North Korea, essential to understanding its human rights and human security situation. It examines the vast oppressive apparatus employed to execute North Korea’s policy of human rights denial and to maintain the status quo. The course also covers the applicable international legal framework, and the available remedies embedded in relevant provisions, as well as the methodology employed by human rights organizations dealing with North Korea, including the execution, processing, and analysis of interviews with North Korean defectors and other witnesses, and their corroboration with satellite imagery and other available relevant data. Also explored in depth is the structure and functions of both the UN system and international civil society.

This course introduces fictional and other critical and cultural perspectives from the postcolonial world. It focuses on selected texts from postcolonial Asia. The course begins by critically investigating the concept of the nation—what Benedict Anderson has famously called an “imagined community.” It explores this concept through reading and discussing texts representing the complexities of imagined communities in Taiwan, India, Sri Lanka, and the Philippines, texts that also represent uneven power relations with China, Japan, the UK, the US, and elsewhere. The course explores the question: why should these texts and ideas matter to us now? 

This course is divided into two parts. The first half of the course offers a comparative modern history of East Asian countries, with a special focus on Hokkaido, Ryukyu-Okinawa, Taiwan, Korea and China, in the framework of Japanese “Nation-Empire” building. The course also explores categories of people, including trafficked children, peddlers, “abducted” women, the Ainu, Taiwan's indigenous people, Micronesians, and Okinawans. The second half of the course focuses on cultural studies (pop culture, movies, music manga, etc.), political economy (regional integration, ASEAN+3, TPP, RCEP, One Belt One Load), comparative politics (political regime, identity, nationalism, democracy), regional security (U.S.-Japan Alliance, U.S. military presence, military cooperation, South China and East China sea, bandwagoning or hedge). The course uses active learning in groups, making maximum use of the mixture of students from different regions and countries, and bringing out different perspectives, points of view, and opinions on various issues and topics.

This course offers a examination of Korean culture through Eastern philosophy and understanding Eastern philosophy through Korean popular culture. It covers the cultures and thoughts of various Asian traditions as well as a wide range of topics, ranging from Buddhism, Confucianism and Taoism to Korean folk beliefs. The areas surveyed in this class include South and Southeast Asia (India, Ceylon, Myanmar, Thailand) as well as East Asia (Korea, China, Japan).