OSAKA UNIVERSITY SHORT-TERM STUDENT EXCHANGE PROGRAM _

02f-06
LINGUISTIC AND CULTURAL DIVERSITY IN JAPAN

Ikuo NAKAMURA, et al. (Faculty of Letters)

Objective
The purpose of this course is to outline the linguistic and cultural diversity of Japan and invalidate the long-established myth that Japan is a homogeneous community. The course will be divided into two parts. The first part will focus on various subcultures in Japan, including such topics as Japanese geography, gender, minorities, religions and university students. The second part will try to elucidate the characteristics of the Japanese language among the languages over the world, paying attention to the internal variation at the same time.

Textbook
No particular books will be used.

Lecture Outline
KOBAYASHI Shigeru
    Introduction
    The place of the Ryukyus in the cultural geography of Japan
TOMIYAMA Ichiro
    Okinawa as the colonial
SUGIHARA Toru
    Migration from/to Modern Japan
TSUTSUMI Kenji
    Regional changes in Japan: cases in depopulated regions
OGINO Miho
    Gender and reproductive culture in Japan
NAKAMURA Ikuo
    Animal rituals of Japanese folk religion
KAWAMURA Kunimitsu
    Japanese new religions
KUDO Mayumi
    Japanese: a typological overview
TOKI Satoshi
    Japanese speech sounds
KISHITA Rika
    Polysemous words of Modern Japanese
AOKI Naoko
    Understanding Japanese university students: a cross-cultural perspective 1
SANADA Shinji
    Dialects of Japan
AOKI Naoko
    Understanding Japanese university students: a cross-cultural perspective 2
SHIBUYA Katsumi
    Language planning in Japan

Grading
Quizzes   56%
Term paper to be submitted at the end of the course   44%
   (The term paper can be connected to only one of the 13 themes of the course.)