Bachelor of Arts (BA) - The University of Hong Kong

219JAPN2013.Women in Japan (6 credits)(This course is also offered to second and third year non-BA students for inter-Faculty broadeningpurposes.)This interdisciplinary content course - taught by lectures and tutorials - focuses on the issue of gender inJapan. It will start with a brief overview of women's position in Japan in various historical periods toprovide a background for dealing with women's roles and positions in contemporary Japanese society.The course will focus on how girls are socialized and educated, on women's role in the family, the workplace, and in public life. Throughout the course the complementary roles of men and women will beexamined, so that a picture of the roles and positions of men in Japan will also emerge.Assessment: 100% coursework (a research project, presentations, participation in group discussions).JAPN2014.China and Japan (6 credits)This interdisciplinary content course will examine the history of Chinese-Japanese relations in thecontext of East Asian world order up to the early twentieth century. Attention will be paid to the factthat the transfer of Chinese culture from China to Japan throughout history has been as much a politicalprocess as a cultural one both for China and Japan. The reverse flow of 'acquired' Western culture fromMeiji Japan to China in the early twentieth century will also be examined in some detail in order toprovide a comparative perspective on the modernization of the two countries. Students must be able toread Chinese. A knowledge of Japanese will be helpful.Assessment: 100% coursework (presentations and essays).JAPN2015.Japanese enterprise groupings (6 credits)(This course is also offered to second and third year non-BA students for inter-Faculty broadeningpurposes.)This interdisciplinary content course - taught by lectures and tutorials - concentrates on the study ofJapanese enterprise groupings. It will start with three major theoretical perspectives on economicorganizations - structural, strategic, and institutional - to enable students to theoretically understandJapanese enterprise groupings. The histories of different enterprise groupings, their operation, and thefunction these groupings serve will then be examined. As such it will focus on such topics as the specialroles of main banks, general trading firms, insurance companies, core member corporations of thegroupings, and the so-called preferential trading between core large corporations and their peripheralcompanies. Finally, the discussion of these topics will be placed in the context of Japanese andAmerican trade conflicts so that students can have a general understanding of the conflicts.Assessment: 50% coursework, 50% examination.Examination: A two-hour written examination at the end of the second semester.JAPN2016.Comparative linguistics: Cantonese and Japanese IComparative phonology (6 credits)(This course is also offered to second and third year non-BA students for inter-Faculty broadeningpurposes.)This interdisciplinary content course will detail the phonological components of Japanese andCantonese through extensive reading of current theories and a contrastive analysis. Besides construingboth common and specific traits of the sound system of human languages, the course will help studentsfamiliarize themselves with the most common sets of transcription used in language studies whichinclude the most important one, the International Phonetic Alphabets (IPA).Assessment: 100% coursework (a series of transcription tests and a final project on comparativestudies).Prerequisite: Japanese language I, Japanese language I(a) or Certificate Japanese Courses.