School of Humanities and Social SciencesWaseda University

The School of Humanities and Social Sciences

From the Dean

Hisao Takamatsu

The educational philosophy of Waseda University School of Humanities and Social Sciences is to “encourage exchange between diverse academic fields, cultures, languages, and values, thereby developing human resources who can proactively contribute to the global community.”

To allow students to learn “diverse academic fields, cultures, languages, and values,” we offer 18 different courses, each of which is delivered by many specialist faculty members, who are respectively in charge of subjects at different stages, from introductory to highly specialized courses and graduation thesis guidance, to provide a systematic curriculum. In fact, the variety of subjects is so comprehensive that one could say there are virtually no humanities fields that you cannot study at our school. Our linguistic education is very diverse as well; we offer many different levels of language subjects, not only in English, Chinese, French, German and Russian, but also in many other major languages, including Spanish, Italian, Korean and Arabic. Students can also learn classical languages (Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit) and Tibetan.

Our curriculum is designed so that new students are first introduced to a diverse world of different cultures and languages, rather than enrolling directly in specific courses, by spending sufficient time learning multiple languages, attending classes in varied fields of study, and building up basic research literacy for later, more specialized studies. After this stage, students decide which courses to enroll in when they start their second year.

Many new students already have specific areas of interest that they were thinking of specializing in at the School of Humanities and Social Sciences as high school students when they enter our school. We heartily welcome such students who already have strong academic orientations when they join us. We particularly want such people to discover new worlds they never knew existed by being introduced to diverse languages and academic fields they were unlikely to come into full contact with in high school.

Lastly, let me talk a little bit about myself. My area of specialty is Japanese classic literature. When I was preparing for my university entrance examination, I was already planning to major in Japanese classics in university, although I had not narrowed down my area of focus any further yet. Some time after my admission into a university, I saw a flyer for a Man’yōshū reading seminar held in a professor’s personal office, which caught my attention. After participating in the seminar a few times, I became totally fascinated and intrigued by it. To me, it was only natural that I wrote my graduation thesis on the Man’yōshū and it has become my area of specialization today. I encountered the Man’yōshū by sheer accident. I hope that many students will experience such accidental encounters while they are in our school as they can have a decisive impact on the rest of their lives. We members of the faculty do our utmost every day to make that happen.