JAPANESE AREA STUDIES

Associate Degree

Career Certificate

Enrollees interested in the Japanese Area Studies or Japanese Career Studies Certificate will take a series of core courses in Japanese culture and language; they will also elect courses from a rich variety of offerings which will allow them to study, for instance, the diplomatic, military, and intellectual relations between Japan, China, and the USA.

The strong poetic tradition expressed in the Haiku of Basho and Issa, the poetic dramas of Chikamatsu, and the recent performance poetry of sansei David Mura; the political and social structures and civil conflicts which gave rise to the Shogunate and the Samurai; the development of Noh and Kabuki theater; the interaction of Japan-ese culture with the ethnic Korean, Ainu, and Okinawan cultures; the powerful visual arts from such exacting observers of society as Utamaro, the wood-block print master, through the post-war examination of society in the films of Kurosawa; the rapid adaptation of western ways in the late nineteenth century, along with the rise of militar-
ism in the first several decades of the twentieth; the writings and actions of such disparate figures as Lady Murasaki, the author of The Tale of Genji, and the Emperor Meiji .