NEWS
What is a MOOC ?
Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are free online courses that anybody can take, and those who complete the course can earn an official certificate for a fee. Top universities around the world offer MOOCs, and the total number of registered learners on the Coursera and edX platforms has reached more than 130 million. Along with self improvement, learners are using MOOCs to improve their professional skills, and the individually validated certificates are helping learners advance in the workplace and make career changes.
Featured Courses
Visualizing Postwar Tokyo, Part 2
The history of postwar Tokyo reveals an essential feature of the modern city, i.e. the city as a place of visualities. In postwar Tokyo, countless gazes fell upon others; gazes from and upon Americans and the Emperor, gazes going up skyscrapers or rushing aggressively through the cityscape, and gazes twining and wriggling among classes, genders, and ethnic groups in downtown Tokyo. In Part 2, we will focus on the geopolitics of these gazes in modern Tokyo. What kinds of gazes fell upon the war orphans, the poor, and the marginalized groups in Tokyo? How did students themselves, who represented the vast accumulation of knowledge in Tokyo, perform in front of these gazes? Moreover, how did cinema or television shows, as media for these gazes, implicate the whole city? In answering these questions, we will identify the geopolitics historically involved in the practice of “visualizing postwar Tokyo.”
Tokyo Hillside, Tokyo Riverside: Exploring the Historical City
In recent years, Tokyo became a global tourist destination as interest in the city increased in the lead-up to the planned 2020 Olympics. While the Olympic venues are concentrated in the city’s southwest and along the waterfront, Tokyo’s historical center and the roots of its urban culture are located in the northeast of the city, in an area stretching from Nihonbashi north through Kanda and Akihabara toward Ueno and Yanaka, and eastward to Asakusa. This area remains home to a wide range of unique historical and cultural heritage. This course offers an introduction to Tokyo’s urban history as Prof. Yoshimi explores northeast Tokyo by foot and boat in two sections: Tokyo Hillside and Tokyo Riverside. Visiting lesser-known historical places that have endured Tokyo’s modern transformation, this course will provide participants a different perspective on Tokyo when visiting for tourism, study, or work. Prof. Yoshimi proposes a method of geo-history that examines the city’s history in the context of its topography and social geography. Both the Hillside and Riverside sections focus on the spatial changes that took place as Tokyo underwent modernization. In particular, the course focuses on how the experience of three military occupations impacted Tokyo’s historical development. The first occupation was at the end of the 16th century, when Tokugawa Ieyasu established a new regime in Edo (modern-day Tokyo). The second was in the late 19th century, when the forces of the new imperial army arrived from Kyoto in the west. The third was the occupation by the American military that began in 1945 and preceded the rapid urban development of the 1950s and 1960s. The lectures will explain how the hillside and riverside areas were impacted by these occupations and underwent urban changes as a result.
Words Spun Out of Images: Visual and Literary Culture in Nineteenth Century Japan
In their ambition to capture “real life,” Japanese painters, poets, novelists and photographers of the nineteenth century collaborated in ways seldom explored by their European contemporaries. This course offers learners the chance to encounter and appreciate behavior, moral standards and some of the material conditions surrounding Japanese artists in the nineteenth century, in order to renew our assumptions about what artistic “realism” is and what it meant. Learners will walk away with a clear understanding of how society and the individual were conceived of and represented in early modern Japan. Unlike contemporary western art forms, which acknowledge their common debt as “sister arts” but remain divided by genre and discourse, Japanese visual and literary culture tended to combine, producing literary texts inspired by visual images, and visual images which would then be inscribed with poems and prose. Noticing and being able to interpret this indivisibility of visual/literary cultures is essential in understanding the social and psychological values embedded within the beauty of Japanese art.
Four Facets of Contemporary Japanese Architecture: Technology
This is the second course of “Four Facets of Contemporary Japanese Architecture” series, with the focus on the second facet: technology. The technology portion will focus on works by architects who explored the use of technology—from techniques used for traditional crafts to computational processes—as a vehicle for their investigations into the conceptualization and production of architecture. Tadao Ando, Shigeru Ban, Manabu Chiba, Kengo Kuma, Kazuhiko Namba, and Yusuke Obuchi will visit their buildings to discuss the ideas behind their respective works.
Got a Minute?
Your opinion matters to us, and we would love to hear about your recommendations on interesting UTokyo courses/lectures that could go worldwide. It would help us create high-quality MOOC courses.
TAKE OUR SURVEY