No description available.

With the capitulation of Japan in August 1945, World Tier II came to an abrupt end but that date signified the beginning of a phenomenon quite unique in history: the transformation of an alien and authoritarian culture into a democratically oriented society by means of educational Ideas and methodology. The role of American educational philosophy in the democratization of Japanese society warrants more attention than it has thus far received. It was with this in mind that the following study was undertaken.

No description available.

No description available.

This paper examines whether extensive listening with the help of audiovisual materials has a positive influence on listening comprehension. Extensive listening is a method used for learning a foreign language that focuses on listening to a number of texts that can be understood by learners with higher levels of comprehension. This method requires access to tools to support the learning plan, appropriate advising, and the availability of resources. Audiovisual materials allow learners to learn verbal and nonverbal language. Therefore, the usage of these materials for extensive listening is perceived as useful. In recent years, learners have received a variety of audiovisual materials outside of class owing to the development of technology. Since extensive listeners have a higher practice in memorizing grammar, vocabulary, or phrases, this study examines the influence of audiovisual materials outside of the classroom. The study included 13 participants—five intermediate and eight elementary level students. The results did not statistically show that there is a positive influence of extensive listening using audiovisual materials on listening comprehension. However, all the participants perceived audiovisual materials to be useful for learning Japanese. These results indicate that extensive listening has a significant impact on listening skills in the field of second-language acquisition.

The aim of this research is to seek to situate women in the development of consumer culture in Japan in the period 1900-1930. This period saw the beginnings of mass consumption and the rise of what was to become one of its central institutions, the department store. One of the most important department stores to emerge was Mitsukoshi, which provided a site in which the new tastes and lifestyles of consumer culture and western modernity could be looked at, sampled and practiced. In effect the store could be seen as providing a new form of 'intimate public sphere' for women. Mitsukoshi also provided images and information on the new consumer culture classifications and learning processes through its house magazines. Other magazines, especially women's magazines, whose readership rapidly expanded in this period, reinforced this message. The extent to which women were seen as the central operators of the emerging consumer culture is a central focus of the thesis. The department stores were not only spaces for women to consume, but also to work. The emergence of saleswomen as a new category of working woman is also discussed. The ways in which an image of a new women emerged as they became employed in greater numbers in the new service occupations and became more visible in the city centre streets and consumption and entertainment sites, is also considered. One variant here was the 'modem girl,' whose image was both discussed and constructed in the media by intellectuals, writers and cultural intermediaries. One of the aims of this work is to sketch out the parameters of this process in Japan and ask how far the stores and other new urban spaces, along with the mediated sources such as magazines, newspapers and the cinema, helped to further some shift (however limited and temporary) in the balance of power between the sexes towards women, along with a concomitant redefinition of what it meant to be a women. The new woman, then, occupied a contested space which a number of parties sought to define: the consumer culture industries such as the department stores, press and cinema; the government with its various thrift and everyday life reform campaigns designed to keep women in the home, albeit as skilled housewives; the various movements for greater women's rights and reform, both in the middle class and the working class militant women workers; the intellectuals and cultural intermediaries, some of whom saw the 'modem girl,' as a new exciting phenomenon of urban modernity; and, of course, the women themselves, who not only reacted to these forces, but gained in their capacity and desire to have a greater say in the process and control over their own lives

The main purpose of this study is to determine the function of no and its place in Japanese Grammar in order to resolve heretofore unsolved problems concerning no. Initiated with this purpose, this dissertation presents an analysis of Words in Japanese with the idea of linguistic analysis based on functors and arguments within the framework largely drawn from Steele (1986), (1987), and (1988). For the formation of Words, we propose a set of rules which is defined in terms of a set of syntactic features which diverges considerably from previous works. Features in our work are not associated with such terms as N or V, but with finite closed-class elements such as particles and tense, from which features it is possible to predict the semantic generalization. Further, it is demonstrated that finite closed-class elements have an important syntactic function associated with them. Case particles are now considered as occupying a position which prenominal determiners have been taking, in the sense that they are a necessary element in an NP. However, they are not considered as a Word, but as part of the morphology of a Word, like other particles. This involves the idea that a Word is determined purely on phonological grounds as a pitch unit. On the base of these fundamental assumptions, our new approach to no enables us to account for every occurrence of no simply and elegantly.

published_or_final_version / abstract / toc / China Area Studies / Master / Master of Arts

No description available.

No description available.