KOREKAWA Haruhiko
Dean
Graduate School of Social and Cultural Systems,
Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences

The Faculty of Literature & Social Sciences is currently composed of two departments: Human Sciences & Cultural Studies and Law, Economics & Public Policy. Both of these departments offer students a wide range of subjects in the varied fields of humanities and social sciences. The Faculty also contains the renowned Nasca, Visual Culture and Regional Social Studies research centres, at which students can gain hands-on experience in fast-moving state-of-the-art research. While there are no proposed changes to these research centres, nor to our Faculty’s core mission of providing high-quality education in the fields of humanities and social sciences, it is planned that the two departments will be reorganized into five programmes. This reorganization is an important component in the mission of Japanese national universities: ensuring that students studying in the provinces gain entry into the world of scholarship. With it, we will be offering additional classes aimed at producing humanities graduates capable of fulfilling the role that our modern society demands: self-starters with well-honed decision making abilities; speakers of foreign languages; computer-literate graduates au fait with surveying techniques and statistical analysis. The most important of our academic goals, however, is to create an atmosphere of lively discussion between student and teacher: an atmosphere where students can wrestle with a range of problems while being supported by university staff. It is my fervent hope that this reorganization, coupled with our high-level specialist staff, will enable the Faculty to both further enliven and intellectually deepen this discussion in the future.