BA English Language and Japanese / Course details

This course explores key aspects of modern and contemporary Japanese society, including the following themes:

• The world of work:  Work, lifecourse and identity, examining the historical formation and current state of the organization and experience of work in large and small organizations.
• Politics, governance and disorder looks at the structure and dynamics of governance, politics, and civil society in Japan, asking how well Japan’s political structures and practices serve the Japanese people. We also consider the role of law in Japanese society, and crime and attempts to deal with it.
• Japan and the outside world explores ways in which Japanese identities have been constructed and contested, especially in relation to the world outside Japan. It considers uses of history and tradition in these processes, and nationalism in Japan.
• Minorities and migrants examines the situation of social and ethnic minorities, and debates within Japan about immigration.

Available on: Japanese Studies programme

• Provide students with an in-depth understanding of key aspects of modern and contemporary Japanese society and culture.
• Introduce major concepts necessary for the understanding of modern and contemporary Japan.
• Provide an understanding of selected key problems faced by modern and contemporary Japan, and the structures, practices and dynamics that underlie and inform these problems.
• Enable students to analyse problems and dynamics in modern and contemporary Japan in an informed and critical way.

• Demonstrate knowledge and understanding of major features of modern and contemporary Japanese society and social dynamics.
• Demonstrate critical understanding of key analytical concepts related to the study of Japanese society.

• Articulate critical analysis of modern and contemporary Japanese society and culture.
• Engage in critical reading and discussion of academic writing on modern and contemporary Japanese society and culture.

• Use library, electronic, and online resources.
• Organise notes derived from lectures, seminars, and reading.

• Engage in well-reasoned presentation, discussion and argument.
• Demonstrate personal qualities of independence of mind in order to make ethical judgements.
• Confront their own values as global citizens.

Assessment task:

Written final examination - 50%

Coursework essay - 50%

(Students can receive formative advice on a full or partial draft/plan of their essay, submitted by the set deadline for the draft) - n/a

Resit Assessment:

Written examination

OR

Essay

• Thomas P. Rohlen. 1974. For Harmony and Strength: Japanese White-Collar Organization in Anthropological Perspective. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.
• Dorinne K. Kondo. 1990. Crafting Selves: Power, Gender, and Discourses of Identity in a Japanese Workplace. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Gerald Curtis. 1971. Election Campaigning Japanese Style. New York: Columbia University Press.
• Harumi Befu. 2001. Hegemony of Homogeneity: An Anthropological Analysis of Nihonjinron. Melbourne: Trans Pacific Press.
• Mike Douglass and Glenda Roberts. (Eds.) 2003. Japan and Global Migration: Foreign Workers and the Advent of a Multicultural Society. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press.