Culture and Society Course (taught in English)

Trans-Border Issues in Education: Student Mobility

This seminar lays out some major trends in student mobility, in particular, in higher education. It provides students an opportunity to develop their awareness and understanding of meanings and significances of student mobility. The seminar takes as its "object" students' experiences as those crossing border(s) to critically examine what student mobility means in the era of globalisation.

Trans-Border Issues in Education: Short-Term Intensive International Programs

This seminar, following the previous class discussion, narrows down students' focus to their experiences in intensive summer/winter program(s), one of major pedagogical formats of short-term international courses. This seminar poses the enduring question, "how do we provide high-impact educational experiences in short-term international courses?" This seminar invites students' active and reflective analyses on their own experiences as course participants of short-term international courses.

Cultural and Linguistic Influences on Cognition

Human cognition and personality could vary between different cultural groups (e.g., West and East) and between different language speakers (e.g., English and Japanese). I will introduce empirical studies in cognitive psychology demonstrating this hypothesis, and discuss implications for daily lives.

Satomi Ito

Invitation to Linguistics: Seeking a Framework to Analyze any Language in the World

Are you struggling to master a foreign language? If you are, then you've already found that the language variety is intriguing yet cumbersome. In this lecture, I will introduce a framework to interpret and compose any language in the world: formal semantics. The talk covers Japanese, English, Chinese and hopefully, your native language!

Maki Tsuchiya

The Inside and the Outside of the Japanese Fine Arts

Japanese fine arts often seem to have strong originality. Of course, on the other hand they are also influenced and developed by images and formats brought from the surrounding areas. In this class, I introduce several cases in Japanese fine arts, and the participants do with time to exchange views with other members about such cases.

Rie Okamura

Japanese Working Women in Leadership Positions from the Viewpoints of Integrating Work, Family and Education

The Japanese government has set a goal to fill 30% of leadership positions with women by 2020. In this class, we will discuss how we can achieve this goal referring results of the survey conducted by Institute for Global Leadership in 2019

Dance as Human Movement

Human movements are affected by cultural backgrounds such as lifestyles. Japanese people has been changing their lifestyle during several decades from Japanese traditional ways to more westernized ways which would also affect our health status. Dance is artistic human movement originated from deep into cultural origins of each area or country. Let's learn about Japanese dance as human movements and enjoy Japanese culture through dancing.

The history and new trends of child education and care in Japan

Japan's first and oldest kindergarten, Ochanomizu university kindergarten opened in 1876 (F. Froebel had founded the world’s first kindergarten in 1837). The class focuses on the history of early childhood education in Japan, the education and childcare philosophy of Ochanomizu University, and the recent efforts and activities at Bunkyo-ku municipal Ochanomizu university kodomo-en, providing opportunities for learning early childhood education and childcare through group dialogues.

February 8th
2021

A quest for the Principle of Animal Body Plan

Diverse animals are derived from a single ancestor in evolution.This fact suggests that various animal forms are all derivative and that a common ancestral body plan should be hidden in their
morphological diversity. What is the principle of animal form, the body plan? Animals are moving organisms in the planet Earth. This condition has given the axis and symmetry to animal forms. We try
to extract the simple principle of animal body plan from diverse animal morphogenesis by focusing on the axis and symmetry.

Quantum Origin of the Universe - atoms, planets, black holes, stars, and galaxies… -

All the structures in the Universe originate from quantum mechanics and attractive forces such as gravity and electromagnetism. In particular, the uncertainty principle of quantum mechanics provides the universal supporting pressure which balances with the attractive forces. In this lecture, we will focus on the basic role of quantum mechanics providing macroscopic structures although the strange behavior of quantum mechanics is often emphasized in the microscopic world.

Protein structure: From its folding through static and dynamic structures.

The protein plays a major role as an element in forming structure of organisms. The protein is a single chain molecule and its blueprint is encrypted in DNA.
Recent studies in computational and molecular biology unveiled how information in DNA converted into a structure of a protein and how proteins perform function in a cell. This lecture gives a brief
overview of the information flow and mechanisms of protein function through its structure.

Nanoworld: Behaviors and functionalities of atoms and molecules.

Contents: "Nano" world means very very small one, namely world of atoms and/or molecules. How do you think that atoms and molecules have shape? If so, do those shapes change with time?
In this lecture, “nanoworld" is briefly explained as a first, simple discussion about atoms and molecules are performed by several groups, and then, those results and shape and time of atoms and molecules are discussed at all.

Dashi and Umami in Japanese Food 

Umami is one of the basic, or primary tastes and it is the fifth taste, joining sweet, sour, salty and bitter. Especially in Japan, umami substances are extracted by making dashi. Three major umami substances were discovered in Japan about 100 years ago and play an important role in Japanese food. The class will lecture about the discovery of umami, how to make dashi, and typical Japanse food washoku using dashi.

Experimental techniques to probe atomic and subatomic structures

Radiation facilities, i.e. particle beam accelerators and synchrotron radiation facilities, are used in many areas of science.For example, structure and functionalities of various materials are explored
with X-ray diffraction and various spectroscopic measurements.Subatomic structures and the fundamental particles and their interactions have been discovered by high energy particle accelerators. 
In this lecture, we will review the principles of typical experiments using particle beams and discuss key concepts to understand what can be learned with such experiments.

Computer Graphics: From Data To Visual Messages

Recent computer graphics techniques archived realistic and fine representations.It has the power to convert data into visual messages.

The former part of this class introduces fundamental computer graphics techniques which are used to various industries including engineering design and entertainments.

The latter part introduces information visualization techniques which make visual representation of daily information.