Japanese (JAPAN)

Terms offered: Spring 2025, Fall 2024, Summer 2024 First 6 Week Session
Japanese 1A is designed to develop basic Japanese language skills: listening, speaking, reading and writing. Students will learn the Japanese writing system: hiragana, katakana and approximately 150 kanji. At the end of the course, students should be able to greet, invite, compare, and describe persons and things, activities, intensions, ability, experience, purposes, reasons, and wishes. Grades will be determined on the basis of attendance, quiz scores, homework and class participation.
Elementary Japanese: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2025, Fall 2024, Summer 2024 Second 6 Week Session
Japanese 1B is designed to develop basic skills acquired in Japanese 1A further. Students will learn approximately 150 new kanji. At the end of the course students should be able to express regret, positive and negative requirements, chronological order of events, conditions, giving and receiving of objects and favors, and to ask and give advice. Grades will be determined on the basis of attendance, quiz scores, homework and class participation.
Elementary Japanese: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2023, Fall 2022
This course is an overview of Japanese literature and culture, 7th- through 18th-centuries. 7A begins with Japan's early myth-history and its first poetry anthology, which show the transition from a preliterate, communal society to a courtly culture. Noblewomen's diaries, poetry anthologies, and selections from the Tale of Genji offer a window into that culture. We examine how oral culture and high literary art mix in Kamakura period tales and explore representations of heroism in military chronicles and medieval Noh drama. After considering the linked verse of late medieval times, we read vernacular literature from the urban culture of the Edo period. No previous course work in Japanese literature, history, or language is expected.
Introduction to Premodern Japanese Literature and Culture: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2025, Summer 2024 Second 6 Week Session, Summer 2023 Second 6 Week Session
An introduction to Japanese literature in translation in a two-semester sequence. 7B provides a survey of important works of 19th- and 20th-century Japanese fiction, poetry, and cultural criticism. The course will explore the manner in which writers responded to the challenges of industrialization, internationalization, and war. Topics include the shifting notions of tradition and modernity, the impact of Westernization on the constructions of the self and gender, writers and the wartime state, literature of the atomic bomb, and postmodern fantasies and aesthetics. All readings are in English translation. Techniques of critical reading and writing will be introduced as an integral part of the course.
Introduction to Modern Japanese Literature and Culture: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2024
This course introduces students to the historical contexts and social forces shaping the production of Japanese texts and media.
Japanese Culture Across Texts and Media: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2024, Spring 2024, Fall 2023
The goal of this course is for the students to understand the language and culture required to communicate effectively in Japanese. Some of the cultural aspects covered are; geography, speech style, technology, sports, food, and religion. Through the final project, students will learn how to discuss social issues and their potential solutions. In order to achieve these goals, students will learn how to integrate the basic linguistics knowledge they acquired in J1, as well as study new structures and vocabulary. An increasing amount of reading and writing, including approximately 200 new kanji, will also be required.
Intermediate Japanese: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2025, Summer 2024 Second 6 Week Session, Spring 2024
The goal of this course is for the students to understand the more advanced language and culture required to communicate effectively in Japanese. Some of the cultural aspects covered are; pop-culture, traditional arts, education, convenient stores, haiku, and history. Through the final project, students will learn how to introduce their own cultures and their influences. In order to achieve these goals, students will learn how to integrate the basic structures and vocabulary they acquired in the previous semesters, as well as study new linguistic expressions. An increasing amount of more advanced reading and writing, including approximately 200 new kanji, will also be required.
Intermediate Japanese: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2023, Fall 2021
This course will develop further context-specific skills in speaking, listening, reading and writing. It concentrates on students using acquired grammar and vocabulary with more confidence in order to express functional meanings, while increasing overall linguistic competence. Students will learn approximately 200 new Kanji. There will be a group or individual project. Course materials include the textbook supplemented by newspapers, magazine articles, short stories, and video clips which will provide insight into Japanese culture and society.
Advanced Japanese: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2024, Spring 2023
This course aims to develop further context-specific skills in speaking, listening, reading and writing. It concentrates on students using acquired grammar and vocabulary with more confidence in order to express functional meanings, while increasing overall linguistic competence. Students will learn approximately 200 new Kanji. There will be a group or individual project. Course materials include the textbook supplemented by newspapers, magazine articles, short stories, essays, and video clips which will provide insight into Japanese culture and society.
Advanced Japanese: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2020, Spring 2017, Spring 2015
Students will be trained to read, analyze, and translate modern Japanese scholarship on Chinese subjects. A major purpose of the course is to prepare students to take reading examinations in Japanese. The areas of scholarship to be covered are: politics, popular culture, religion, sociology and history as well as areas suggested by students who are actively engaged in research projects. Two readings in selected areas will be assigned, one by the instructor and the second by a student participant.
Japanese for Sinologists: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2023, Fall 2021, Fall 2019
Students develop their reading, writing, speaking, and listening skills further to think critically, to express their points of view, and to understand Japanese culture and society in depth The readings are mainly articles on current social issues from Japanese newspapers, magazines, and professional books as sources of discussions. Students are required to write short essays on topics related to the reading materials.
Fourth-Year Japanese: Aspects of Japanese Society: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2024, Spring 2020, Spring 2018
This course provides students an opportunity to develop their reading, writing, speaking, and listening skills in order to express their opinions in argumentative discourse. Students read and discuss a variety of Japanese texts to deepen their understanding of Japanese society and people and to improve their intercultural communicative competence.
Fourth-Year Readings: Japanese Culture: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2018, Fall 2016
This course provides students an opportunity to develop their reading, writing, speaking, and listening skills, thereby enabling them to express their points of view and to engage in argumentative discourse. In addition to Japanese literature, readings include academic essays and other texts, which provide a variety of writing styles and serve as sources for classroom discussion. Also, Japanese films are used for various activities in order to broaden students’ cultural awareness and knowledge of Japanese society.
Fourth-Year Readings: Japanese Literature: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2017, Spring 2015, Spring 2014
Students develop their reading, writing, speaking, and listening skills further while examining Japanese historical figures, events, background, stories, etc. Students read a variety of texts and watch videos related to Japanese history as sources for discussions to deepen their understanding of Japanese society, culture, and people from historical perspectives. Students conduct individual research on a topic in Japanese history, and write a short research paper.
Fourth-Year Readings: Japanese History: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2023, Spring 2021
In this course, students will practice various techniques to read articles in Japanese on current issues in Japan, and they will learn about Japanese conceptions of the world and how Japanese society functions. They may want to compare what they have learned with similar issues in their own countries to deepen their understanding of the issues and develop their critical thinking ability. They will also learn more advanced Japanese grammar and increase their vocabulary.
Fourth-Year Japanese: Current Issues in Japan: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2023, Fall 2021
This course provides a critical survey of prominent and other noteworthy expressions of Buddhist thought and culture in Japanese history. The Japanese experience of Buddhist teachings, practices and institutions, as well as aesthetic expressions in painting, sculpture, architecture, garden design, literature, and theatre will be examined against the backdrop of the transmission of all these forms of Buddhist culture from India to China to Korea to Japan. Special attention will also be given to the fusion of Buddhist and “native” Japanese sensibilities in theater (Noh, Kabuki, and Bunraku) and popular art such as ukiyo-e prints and manga.
Buddhism and its Culture in Japan: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2024, Fall 2021, Fall 2019
An introductory look at the culture, values, and history of religious traditions in Japan, covering the Japanese sense of the world physically and culturally, its native religious culture called Shinto, the imported continental traditions of Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism, the arrival and impact of Christianity in the 16th century and the New Religions of the 19th and 20th centuries. Focus will be on how the internal structure of Buddhist and Confucian values were negotiated with long-established views of mankind and society in Japan, how Japan has been changed by these foreign notions of the individual’s place in the world, particularly Buddhism, and why many see contemporary Japan as a post-religious society.
Introduction to the Religions of Japan: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2023, Fall 2022
An introduction to classical Japanese (bungo), the premodern vernacular, which was used as Japan's literary language until well into the 20th century and remains essential for a thorough grounding in Japanese literature and culture.
Introduction to Classical Japanese: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2024, Fall 2023, Spring 2021
An introduction to the critical analysis and translation of traditional Japanese poetry, a genre that reaches from early declarative work redolent of an even earlier oral tradition to medieval and Early Modern verses evoking exquisitely differentiated emotional states via complex rhetoric and literary allusion. Topics may include examples of Japan's earliest poetry in Man'yoshu, Heian courtly verse in Kokinshu, lines from Shinkokinshu with its medieval mystery and depth, linked verse (renga), and the haikai of Basho and his circle.
Classical Japanese Poetry: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2015, Spring 2011, Spring 2009
The tradition of Japanese self-reflective literature, composed by both men and women, is long and rich. Topics for this course include highly personal memoirs by court women and poetic travel diaries.
Premodern Japanese Diary (Nikki) Literature: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2010, Spring 2000
The course focuses on select masterpieces from the Japanese narrative tradition, including Murasaki Shikibu’s The Tale of Genji (Genji monogatari) and Sei Shonagon’s The Pillow Book (Makura no soshi).
Heian Prose: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2023, Fall 2020, Fall 2018
Introductory reading class focusing on premodern texts written in Kanbun, the Japanese way of reading and writing Classical Chinese. The first half focuses on the orthography and syntax of Kanbun, primarily using examples from military texts from the medieval period. The second half focuses on writings considered artistic, religious (Buddhist), literary, historical, biographical, or ritualistic in nature, including snapshots of doctrinal statements by influential thinkers in the Buddhist tradition. In that Kanbun is Chinese in format but was nearly always read in Classical Japanese word order, this fulfills the Japanese-major requirement of a second semester of Classical Japanese.
Introductory Readings in Kanbun: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2018, Spring 2013, Spring 2012
Critical reading and translation of important literary texts from the Edo period, including poetic diaries, merchant fiction, and (joruri) drama.
Edo Literature: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2014, Spring 2012, Fall 2009
Writings in the Japanese vernacular constitute only one part of the total premodern Japanese written corpus. Until the 20th century, the preferred medium for most historical texts and male diaries was Sino-Japanese (kanbun). Familiarity with the grammar of this extraordinarily rich tradition is therefore essential for all students of premodern Japanese disciplines
Japanese Historical Documents: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2023, Fall 2022
This course is an introduction to Japanese modernism through the reading and discussion of representative short stories, poetry, and criticism of the Taisho and early Showa periods. We will examine the aesthetic bases of modernist writing and confront the challenge posed by their use of poetic language. The question of literary form and the relationship between poetry and prose in the works will receive special attention.
Modern Japanese Literature: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2024, Spring 2023
This course examines the historical production and reception of key Japanese literary and film texts; how issues of gender, ethnicity, social roles, and national identity specific to each text address changing economic and social conditions in postwar Japan.
Contemporary Japanese Literature: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2024, Spring 2023, Spring 2022
This course deals with issues of the structure of the Japanese language and how they have been treated in the field of linguistics. It focuses on phonetics/phonology, morphology, writing systems, dialects, lexicon, and syntax/semantics, historical changes, and genetic origins. Students are required to have intermediate knowledge of Japanese. No previous linguistics training is required.
Introduction to Japanese Linguistics: Grammar: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2023, Fall 2022
This course deals with issues of the usage of the Japanese language and how they have been treated in the field of linguistics. It concentrates on pragmatics, modality/evidentiality, deixis, speech varieties (politeness, gender, written vs. spoken), conversation management, and rhetorical structure. Students are required to have intermediate knowledge of Japanese. No previous linguistics training is required.
Introduction to Japanese Linguistics: Usage: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2024, Spring 2023, Spring 2022
An overview of the concepts of theoretical, contrastive, and practical linguistics which form the basis for work in translation between Japanese and English through hands-on experience. Topics include translatability, various kinds of meaning, analysis of the text, process of translating, translation techniques, and theoretical background.
Translation: Theory and Practice: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2023, Fall 2022
This course is designed for those at high-intermediate to low-advanced level of fluency in Japanese to further develop their reading proficiency through detailed grammatical analyses of selected texts. Although adequate knowledge of both vocabulary and grammar is essential for understanding the text, often in foreign-language learning, vocabulary typically receives more emphasis than grammar.
Through assigned texts, students learn through a hands-on approach how words are combined to form a phrase, how phrases are combined to form a clause, how clauses are combined to form a sentence, how sentences are combined to form a text. Readings are selected from modern Japanese writing on current affairs, social sciences, history, and literature.
Reading Japanese Texts Using Advanced Grammatical Analysis: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2014, Fall 2010, Fall 2008
This course surveys Japanese poetry and/or prose written predominantly in or before the Heian Period (794-1185). Topics will vary.
Classical Japanese Literature in Translation: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2023, Spring 2020
This course surveys modern Japanese fiction and poetry in the first half of the 20th century. Topics will vary.
Modern Japanese Literature in Translation: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2007
Course explores stereotypical images of traditional Japanese culture and people through archaeological analysis. Particular emphasis will be placed on changing lifeways of past residents of the Japanese islands, including commoners, samurai, and nobles. Consideration will be given to the implications of these archaeological studies for our understanding of Japanese identities.
Archaeology and Japanese Identities: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2020, Fall 2018, Fall 2017

Urami (rancor, resentment) has an enduring presence in Japanese literature. Figures overburdened with urami become demons, vengeful ghosts, or other transformed, dangerous, scheming characters. They appear in many different genre and eras. The course's topic enables discussion on concepts important for understanding Japanese literary works such as hyper-attentiveness to shifting social status, the role of groupness in targeting victims, the imperatives of shame, secrets, the circumscribed agency of women, and the reach of Buddhist teachings into behavioral norms. For those interested in comparative literature, the course offers an opportunity to take a measure of what Japanese narratives offer as legitimate causes of rancor and revenge.
Urami: Rancor and Revenge in Japanese Literature: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2023, Spring 2022, Fall 2019
This course will examine the works of the novelist Murakami Haruki and the animator Miyazaki Hayao within the context of contemporary Japanese aesthetics and history. Both Murakami and Miyazaki debuted in 1979 and their work has very much defined Japan’s cultural experience from the tail end of the Era of High Growth Economics through the Bubble Era, the Lost Decade, and into the twenty-first century. Students will explore the works of these two figures in the context of the history of Japanese literature and film and its relation to larger political, social, and cultural trends of Japan from the 1980s to the present.
Murakami Haruki and Miyazaki Hayao: the Politics of Japanese Culture from the Bubble to the Present: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2013, Fall 2008, Spring 2008
The course examines the complex meanings of the ghost in modern Japanese literature and culture. Tracing the representations of the supernatural in drama, fiction, ethnography, and the visual arts, we explore how ghosts provide the basis for remarkable flights of imaginative speculation and literary experimentation. Topics include: storytelling and the loss of cultural identity, horror and its conversion into aesthetic pleasure, fantasy, and the transformation of the commonplace. We will consider historical, visual, anthropological, and literary approaches to the supernatural and raise cultural and philosophical questions crucial to an understanding of the figure and its role in the greater transformation of modern Japan (18th century to the present).
Ghosts and the Modern Literary Imagination: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2019, Spring 2018, Fall 2016
The course considers the different literary, social and ethical formations that arise or are destroyed in disaster. It explores how Japanese literature and media, before and after 3:11, attempt to translate the un-representable, and in so doing, to create a new type of literacy about 1) trauma and the temporality of disaster, 2) precarity, community and the public sphere and 3) sustainability and ecological scale. The course will pay particular attention to a range of works that explicitly or obliquely reframe iconic or popular representations of disasters in cinema, literature and other media, taking into account of the readiness with which certain cultural forms lend themselves to vistas of disaster.
Reframing Disasters: Fukushima, Before and After: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2018, Fall 2015, Spring 2013
This course will offer a survey of Japanese cinema from its earliest days to contemporary anime (animated film). Providing the basic tools for analyzing film language, the course begins by analyzing the interactions between early Japanese film and early Hollywood. We then consider the development of Japanese film, discussing style and structures of connotation, figurative meaning and political critique, the uses of the historical past and ideology, and the roles of youth culture and views of the family. We consider the place of important individual directors. We also discuss current critical debates about broader trends in Japanese film and culture, as they illuminate the construction and ruptures in notions of Japanese identity.
Introduction to Japanese Cinema: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2019, Spring 2017
This course is an introduction to Japanese animation, or anime, from its earliest forms (in relationship to manga) to recent digital culture, art, and games. We will analyze and study mainly animated feature films and read the critical work they inspired. We will address such issues as cultural memory and apocalyptic imagination, robots and the post-human, cities, nature, and the transnational; gender, shojo, and the aesthetics of "cute," as well as consider specific issues in the theoretical understanding of anime within technology and media theory.
Japanese Visual Culture: Introduction to Anime: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2021, Summer 2018 Second 6 Week Session, Fall 2013
Selected topics in the study of Japanese film.
Topics in Japanese Film: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2023, Fall 2022
Directed independent study and preparation of senior honors thesis. Limited to senior honors candidates in East Asian Languages (for description of Honors Program, see Index).
Honors Course: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2021, Spring 2019, Fall 2015
Directed independent study and preparation of senior honors thesis. Limited to senior honors candidates in East Asian Languages (for description of Honors Program, see Index).
Honors Course: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2023, Fall 2022, Spring 2022, Fall 2021, Spring 2021
This seminar serves as an introduction to a broad range of Japanese Buddhist literature belonging to different historical periods and genres, including liturgical texts; monastic records, rules, and ritual manuals; doctrinal treatises; biographies of monks; and histories of Buddhism in Japan. Students are required to do all the readings in the original languages, which are classical Chinese (Kanbun) and classical Japanese. It will also serve as a tools and methods course, covering basic reference works and secondary scholarship in the field of Japanese Buddhism. The content of the course will be adjusted from semester to semester to accommodate the needs and interests of the students.
Readings in Japanese Buddhist Texts: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2024, Spring 2023
Topics run from Japan's earliest extant poetic anthologies in Chinese (Kaifuso) or Japanese (Man'yoshu) to medieval linked verse (renga) and Edo haikai.
Seminar in Classical Japanese Poetry: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2024, Spring 2016
An introduction to research tools for Japanese studies. The course gives primary consideration to literary sources but also presents an overview of basic texts and web sites dealing with bibliographical citation, lexicography, history, religion, fine arts, geography, personal names, biographies, genealogies, and calendrical calculation. Internet access is required.
Japanese Bibliography: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2019, Spring 2013, Fall 2004
Topics may include examples from the Noh, Kyogen, Joruri, or Kabuki theaters.
Seminar in Classical Japanese Drama: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2024, Spring 2023, Spring 2022
Topics may include works of Heian fiction such as The Tale of Genji (Genji monogatari) and memoirs such as The Pillow Book (Makura no soshi).
Seminar in Classical Japanese Texts: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2006, Fall 2001
Topics may include medieval war tales (gunki monogatari), essays (zuihitsu), and diaries in Japanese or Sino-Japanese (kanbun).
Seminar in Medieval Japanese Texts: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2023, Fall 2022, Spring 2021
Reading and critical evaluation of selected texts in prewar (roughly the 1860s though the 1940s) Japanese literature and literary and cultural criticism. Texts change with each offering of the course.
Seminar in Prewar Japanese Literature: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2024, Fall 2021
Reading and critical evaluation of selected texts in postwar (roughly the 1940s through the present) Japanese literature and literary and cultural criticism. Texts change with each offering of the course.
Seminar in Postwar Japanese Literature: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2025, Fall 2024, Spring 2024
Special tutorial or seminar on selected topics not covered by available courses or seminars.
Directed Study for Graduate Students: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2016, Fall 2015, Spring 2015

Thesis Preparation and Related Research: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2016, Fall 2015, Spring 2015
Individual study for the comprehensive or language requirements in consultation with the graduate adviser. Units may not be used to meet either unit or residence requirements for a master's degree.
Individual Study for Master's Students: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2016, Fall 2015, Spring 2015
Individual study in consultation with the major field adviser, intended to provide an opportunity for qualified students to prepare for various examinations required of candidates for the Ph.D.
Individual Study for Doctoral Students: Read More [+]