JAPN 311: Social Issues In Japan
Course Description: As the drive to rebuild modern Japan after WWII slowed, latent and new social problems have become visible. This course offers interdisciplinary perspectives on issues such as care of the elderly and homeless, equal treatment of minorities, gender and labor issues, domestic and world ecological concerns, and relevant institutions that promote or attack prejudice towards heterogeneous social groups. Taught in English. (Prereq: GE Areas A1 and A2 and A3 and B4 with a C- or better)
Course Narrative: Throughout the class we read articles about various social issues in Japan and discussed these issues in class. We kept a small weekly blog to express our thoughts on a topic relating to the readings of each week. We also created a short research paper on a topic of our choice relating to social issues in Japan. I chose to do my paper on women's language in Japan. One of the subjects that we covered that was very surprising to me was "hypersexual virgins." We learned about a small group of people that were either marrying themselves or in some cases getting married to fictional characters. The case we specifically read about was a person getting married to fictional character Hatsune Miku(a vocaloid singer). While this is certainly a strange case when compared to the "norm," news and media outlets that wrote about these cases tended to use very clickbait styles of titles and were written in a way that made Japan seem to be this weird country where people do these things.
This course covers MLO 2
Course Narrative: Throughout the class we read articles about various social issues in Japan and discussed these issues in class. We kept a small weekly blog to express our thoughts on a topic relating to the readings of each week. We also created a short research paper on a topic of our choice relating to social issues in Japan. I chose to do my paper on women's language in Japan. One of the subjects that we covered that was very surprising to me was "hypersexual virgins." We learned about a small group of people that were either marrying themselves or in some cases getting married to fictional characters. The case we specifically read about was a person getting married to fictional character Hatsune Miku(a vocaloid singer). While this is certainly a strange case when compared to the "norm," news and media outlets that wrote about these cases tended to use very clickbait styles of titles and were written in a way that made Japan seem to be this weird country where people do these things.
This course covers MLO 2