Institute of East Asian Studies

Japanese Language Study at Berkeley

Japan Related Courses - Spring 2024

Anthropology Department

Japan

ANTHRO 171

This course offers an introductory survey of Japan from a four-field anthropological perspective. It is open without prerequisite to anyone with a curiosity about what makes Japanese culture and society as it is today, and to anyone concerned about the diverse conditions of modern life. We will range over many aspects of contemporary Japan, and draw on scholarship in history, literature, religion, and the various social sciences.

Group in Buddhist Studies

Buddhism on the Silk Road

BUDDSTD C120

Also offered as: EALANG C120

This course will discuss the social, economic, and cultural aspects of Buddhism as it moved along the ancient Eurasian trading network referred to as the “Silk Road”. Instead of relying solely on textual sources, the course will focus on material culture as it offers evidence concerning the spread of Buddhism. Through an examination of the Buddhist archaeological remains of the Silk Road, the course will address specific topics, such as the symbiotic relationship between Buddhism and commerce; doctrinal divergence; ideological shifts in the iconography of the Buddha; patronage (royal, religious and lay); Buddhism and political power; and art and conversion. All readings will be in English.

Buddhism in Contemporary Society

BUDDSTD C128

Also offered as: EALANG C128

A study of the Buddhist tradition as it is found today in Asia. The course will focus on specific living traditions of East, South, and/or Southeast Asia. Themes to be addressed may include contemporary Buddhist ritual practices; funerary and mortuary customs; the relationship between Buddhism and other local religious traditions; the relationship between Buddhist institutions and the state; Buddhist monasticism and its relationship to the laity; Buddhist ethics; Buddhist "modernism," and so on.

Proseminar in Buddhist Studies

BUDDSTD 200

This seminar provides an opportunity for all students and faculty in the Group in Buddhist Studies to gather together on a regular basis to discuss recent theoretically significant works in the field of Buddhist Studies, as well as pertinent and important works in related disciplines (anthropology, art history, literature, history, philosophy, and religious studies). The content of the course will be adjusted from semester to semester so as to best accommodate the needs and interest of the students, but the focus will be on recent works representing the "state of the field." 

Comparative Literature

Senior Seminar in Comparative Literature: Inventing the West

COMLIT 190

“Tell me, haven’t you ever thought that the west might lie in the opposite direction”—         Diamela Eltit, "Los vigilantes"

So much of today’s cultural debate invokes “the West” as if we all know what the term means. Is it a place, a concept, an identity? West of where? This course will look at different and often counterintuitive modes of representing the West in reference to both the western United States and the broader geopolitical or even metaphysical idea of the West. Borrowing from the critical vocabulary of “orientalism,” we will study the contradictory ideas and practices associated with the concept and lived reality of the West, as both an imagined space of open possibility and an imperial project of settler colonialism. Given our location in California, we’ll place an early emphasis on ecology and environment in the deserts and mountains of the Southwestern United States to California’s central valley and the coast. Intersecting with these environments, we’ll take up questions of migration and labor, from the Great Migrations of African American people to Los Angeles at the turn of the 20th-century or the shipyards of the Bay Area in the 1940s, to the ongoing migration across and contestation of the US-Mexico border. From there we’ll reorient this locally familiar understanding of the West and interrogate its shifting meanings from writers and artists in Germany, Japan, Egypt, France, Senegal, and elsewhere.

Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures

Elementary Japanese

JAPAN 1A

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.

JAPAN 1B

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.

Introduction to Modern Japanese Literature and Culture

JAPAN 7B

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.

Intermediate Japanese

JAPAN 10A

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.

JAPAN 10B

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.

Advanced Japanese

JAPAN 100B offered through East Asian Languages and Cultures

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.

Fourth-Year Readings: Japanese Culture

JAPAN 102 offered through East Asian Languages and Cultures

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.

Introduction to the Religions of Japan

JAPAN 1016 offered through East Asian Languages and Cultures

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.

Classical Japanese Poetry

JAPAN 130

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.

Contemporary Japanese Literature | Postwar Manga: from yonkoma to Garo

JAPAN 159 offered through East Asian Languages and Cultures

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. 

Introduction to Japanese Linguistics: Grammar

JAPAN 160 offered through East Asian Languages and Cultures

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. 

Translation: Theory and Practice

JAPAN 163 offered through East Asian Languages and Cultures

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.

Directed Group Study

JAPAN 198 offered through East Asian Languages and Cultures

Small group instruction in topics not covered by regularly scheduled courses. 

Seminar in Classical Japanese Poetry

JAPAN 230 offered through East Asian Languages and Cultures

Topics run from Japan's earliest extant poetic anthologies in Chinese (Kaifuso) or Japanese (Man'yoshu) to medieval linked verse (renga) and Edo haikai.

Japanese Bibliography

JAPAN 232 offered through East Asian Languages and Cultures

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.

Seminar in Postwar Japanese Literature

JAPAN 259 offered through East Asian Languages and Cultures

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.

Directed Study for Graduate Students

JAPAN 298 offered through East Asian Languages and Cultures

Special tutorial or seminar on selected topics not covered by available courses or seminars.

Freshman Seminar: Ozu's Tokyo: Exploring Japan's Metropolis through the Films of Ozu Yasujiro

EALANG 24

The director Ozu Yasujiro was born in Tokyo in 1903 and the city plays an important role in his films from the late 1920s through his death in 1963. Using his films as a starting point, we will learn how the city changed over the course of the twentieth century from the aftermath of the 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake through WWII and the Allied Occupation and into the beginning of High Growth Economics and the preparations for the 1964 Tokyo Olympics.

Science Fiction in East Asia

EALANG 162

This course comprises an immersive survey of science fiction - historically the only literary genre fully devoted to imagining the alterity of the future - as it takes on a unique and pressing relevance in contemporary East Asian culture and society. Providing students with both comprehensive training in literary analysis and critical thinking as well as a substantive sociohistorical introduction to contemporary East Asian societies and politics, the course will constitute a solid foundation for the East Asian humanities major. All readings will be in English; no prior knowledge of Asian languages and/or cultures expected.

English Department

Reading and Composition: Realism in an Uneven World

ENG R1A

What are we talking about when we call a piece of literature “realistic”? What does our sense of the “realistic” say about us, our identity, our politics, our worldview?

This Rhetoric and Composition course will sample literary realism and its theorizations from the early nineteenth century to the present. We will explore how, far from straightforwardly or directly representing things “as they are,” the category of literary realism can be taken to designate a variety of strategies for registering and responding to the unevenness of capitalist development in different geographical and politico-economic contexts: 1830s France, 1890s Russia, 1920s Japan, 1930s Martinique, and more.

Because this is a Rhetoric and Composition course, one central priority of ours will be to develop effective reading, note-taking, and writing strategies for college writing. Half of our time will be spent examining and practicing the basic skills involved in the writing of thesis-driven essays, including summary, analysis, thesis construction, and text citation.

Department of History

Special Topics in the History of Science: History of Science, Technology, and Medicine in Modern East Asia

HISTORY 100S/183

This course introduces the history of science, medicine and technology in modern East Asia—mainly China, Japan, Korea, and their inland and maritime peripheries—between the sixteenth and twenty-first centuries. The first half of the course examines the reconfiguration in understandings of the body and the natural world, as well as the politics of medicine and technology, during the transition from the early modern to the modern period. The second half puts this East Asian reconfiguration into global perspective over the last century. A central goal will be to explore different methodological approaches including traditional history of science, social history, post-colonial studies, gender, translation studies, and material culture.

Proseminar: Problems in Interpretation in the Several Fields of History: Comparative History
Third World Fascisms: ideologies of populist authoritarianism in the Global South

HISTORY 103U

A wave of fascisms is sweeping the globe. While we are familiar with fascism in the early part of the 20th century in Germany, Italy and Spain, it goes less noticed that fascism is currently one of the momentous transformations sweeping the world. Fascism is resurgent in the US, Russia, China, India, Southeast Asia, and Africa. This begs the question of what fascism is in the global South, and how we might trace a history of fascism from its modern day origins in Germany, Italy and Spain to Taiwan, China, Japan, Russia, South America, Southeast Asia and Africa. In this seminar we will use India as the paradigmatic case of the most successful post-colonial democracy in the world which in a short fifty years after independence has veered towards a distinctive form of fascism which derives from the Nazi paradigm but with important variations drawing from local inspiration. This class will think about the origins of fascism in the third world/Global South in comparative perspective.

The Twentieth Century in Japan

HISTORY 118C

This course addresses a twofold question: what did the 20th century mean for Japan? And what did Japan mean for the 20th century? In search of answers, we will trace Japan's emergence as a “world-shaper” in its two phases, military and economic, focusing on the institutional, social, and cultural transformations that were attendant to each phase and continue to define Japan’s presence in the contemporary world.

Interdisciplinary Social Science Programs

Asia in Global Context

GLOBAL 110Q

This course provides students with an introduction to Asia in global context. The course employs a Global History approach, which emphasizes national histories as a part of a series of global processes. It explores how countries in Asia, regardless of their diverse cultures, have been drawn into the development of global capitalism. This course addresses all of the Global Studies major’s concentrations, i.e. Societies and Cultures, Development, Peace and Conflict.