Misaki's Journal is an interactive Japanese Graded Reader. This means that each journal entry has printable materials and well as digital and intractable resources available for students to use alongside their reading experience.

Please also check out the Teacher's Notebook and Misaki's Journal in the OER Japanese Grader Reader (Misaki's Journal).

Noh, the oldest surviving Japanese dramatic form, combines elements of dance, drama, music, and poetry into a highly stylized, aesthetic retelling of a well-known story from Japanese literature, such as The Tale of Genji or The Tale of the Heike. This lesson provides an introduction to the elements of Noh plays and to the text of two plays, and provides opportunities for students to compare the conventions of the Noh play with other dramatic forms with which they may already be familiar, such as the ancient Greek dramas of Sophocles. By reading classic examples of Noh plays, such as Atsumori, students will learn to identify the structure, characters, style, and stories typical to this form of drama. Students will expand their grasp of these conventions by using them to write the introduction to a Noh play of their own.

The United States experienced extensive economic and geographical expansion during the 1840s, as the spirit of Manifest Destiny drove Americans west across the North American continent to exert their influence over new places and peoples. Influenced by this expansionary philosophy, political leaders sought to expand American trade relationships worldwide. One of the first targets of this campaign was to open diplomatic and trade relations with isolationist Japan, which had been closed to western traders for centuries. In 1852, President Millard Fillmore ordered Commodore Matthew C. Perry to lead an expedition to secure Japanese trade and access to Japan’s ports for American ships.

This article describes online artifact collections available through the Arctic Studies Center, a part of the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History. The collection includes artifacts and background information about the peoples of Alaska and Northeast Siberia.

Distinguished social scientist and public intellectual Chalmers Johnson, President of the Japan Policy Institute, joins host Harry Kreisler for a conversation on the nature of the American Empire and its costs and consequences for the future of American democracy and power in the world. (58 min)

This resource is a video abstract of a research paper created by Research Square on behalf of its authors. It provides a synopsis that's easy to understand, and can be used to introduce the topics it covers to students, researchers, and the general public. The video's transcript is also provided in full, with a portion provided below for preview:

"Real-world data and real-world evidence are terms widely used in the field of health care. In fact, various stakeholders are showing increasing interest in using real world data and real world evidence. Pharmaceutical companies, for example, use real world data for various purposes—from the early stages of development to post-launch. One hot topic focuses on using real world data and real world evidence to support regulatory decision making to deliver drugs faster to patients with high medical needs. This has been the subject of active discussion in the US, Europe, Japan and other countries, leading to regulatory reform and improvement of the implementation environment. However, there are barriers to the regulatory acceptance and use of both real world data and real world evidence. Real world data should be evaluated not only for quality but also for data relevance. There is a lack of universally accepted methodological criteria..."

The rest of the transcript, along with a link to the research itself, is available on the resource itself.

The 2017-2018 academic year saw the 150th anniversary of Japan’s 1868 Meiji Restoration, an epochal political revolution that sparked Japan’s remarkable modernization, dramatic cultural transformation, and rapid emergence onto the global stage. To mark this historic date, colleagues across the University of British Columbia in the Centre for Japanese Research, the Department of History, the Department of Asian Studies, the Asian Library, and the Museum of Anthropology partnered to present the UBC Meiji at 150 Project. Over the course of the year, the Meiji at 150 project convened over 60 scholars of Japanese studies from around North America, Japan, and Europe to situate Japan in global history and to interrogate the place of the Meiji Restoration in Japanese history, historical pedagogy, and cultural studies. All told, the Meiji at 150 Project reached thousands of individuals around the globe through its various events and initiatives, centering the study of Japanese history in the UBC university community and solidifying UBC’s position as the premier institution for Japanese studies outside of Japan.

Students study how geology relates to the frequency of large-magnitude earthquakes in Japan. Using the online resources provided through the Earthquakes Living Lab, students investigate reasons why large earthquakes occur in this region, drawing conclusions from tectonic plate structures and the locations of fault lines. Working in pairs, students explore the 1995 Kobe earthquake, why it happened and the destruction it caused. Students also think like engineers to predict where other earthquakes are likely to occur and what precautions might be taken. A worksheet serves as a student guide for the activity.

This resource is a video abstract of a research paper created by Research Square on behalf of its authors. It provides a synopsis that's easy to understand, and can be used to introduce the topics it covers to students, researchers, and the general public. The video's transcript is also provided in full, with a portion provided below for preview:

"Wet age-related macular degeneration, or wet AMD, occurs when newly formed blood vessels leak or bleed into the center of the retina, resulting in poor vision. Proactive treatment with intravitreal aflibercept has produced good outcomes in clinical studies. The treat-and-extend dosing strategy in particular has been shown to produce similar visual outcomes to fixed dosing every 4 or 8 weeks. And real-world evidence suggests that patients treated proactively in real life show outcomes similar to those observed in clinical trials. In the ALTAIR study, investigators explored how to fine-tune the proactive treat-and-extend approach in Japanese patients. The study aimed to identify the optimal extension interval for individual patients and individualize treatment with optimal extension to reduce the treatment burden for as many patients as possible. Ideally, treatments would be as infrequent as once every 16 weeks—with fast extensions made in 4-week increments—while maintaining initial vision gains..."

The rest of the transcript, along with a link to the research itself, is available on the resource itself.

This resource is a video abstract of a research paper created by Research Square on behalf of its authors. It provides a synopsis that's easy to understand, and can be used to introduce the topics it covers to students, researchers, and the general public. The video's transcript is also provided in full, with a portion provided below for preview:

"Exotic species are a big problem worldwide. While the mechanisms of invasion vary from one exotic species to the next, researchers can tease out patterns that are useful for understanding and ultimately managing invasion. A new study published in the Journal of Biogeography reveals how one team has applied an emerging method known as the phylogenetic field approach to do just that for exotic plants in Japan. The results offer critical insight into how ecology and evolution influence the dynamics of invasion. Darwin’s On the Origin of Species marked the first time biological invasion had been addressed using the principles of evolutionary ecology. But followed to their logical end, these principles yielded two contradictory hypotheses. The pre-adaptation hypothesis states that exotic species successfully colonize assemblages with native species that are ecologically similar because both require the same set of environmental conditions to thrive..."

The rest of the transcript, along with a link to the research itself, is available on the resource itself.

In this video segment adapted from NASA, students in Matsuyama City, Japan, interview Expedition 8 Commander and NASA Science Officer Mike Foale and Flight Engineer Alexander Kaleri about life and work aboard the International Space Station.

The goal of this exercise is to explore gender role attitudes in Japan and how they vary across different parts of the population. Crosstabulation will be used.

Students will learn to describe people and items using learned descriptive vocabulary. Students will practice guessing items and people based on the descriptions provided.

This study abroad guide is designed to help students prepare for their study abroad experience in Tokyo, Japan. This interactive journal contains a list of important information alongside photos and authentic materials such as train tickets, traffic signs, menus, and bank ATMs. It also provides cultural tidbits and personal experiences that are intended to assist students in adjusting to Japanese culture and society during their study abroad.

At age twenty-seven, physicist Philip Morrison joined the Manhattan Project, the code name given to the U.S. government's covert effort at Los Alamos to develop the first nuclear weapon. The Manhattan Project was also the most expensive single program ever financed by public funds. In this video segment, Morrison describes the charismatic leadership of his mentor, J. Robert Oppenheimer, and the urgency of their mission to manufacture a weapon 'which if we didn't make first would lead to the loss of the war." In the interview Morrison conducted for War and Peace in the Nuclear Age: 'Dawn,' he describes the remote, inaccessible setting of the laboratory that operated in extreme secrecy. It was this physical isolation, he maintains, that allowed scientists extraordinary freedom to exchange ideas with fellow physicists. Morrison also reflects on his wartime fears. Germany had many of the greatest minds in physics and engineering, which created tremendous anxiety among Allied scientists that it would win the atomic race and the war, and Morrison recalls the elaborate schemes he devised to determine that country's atomic progress. At the time that he was helping assemble the world's first atomic bomb, Morrison believed that nuclear weapons 'could be made part of the construction of the peace.' A month after the war, he toured Hiroshima, and for several years thereafter he testified, became a public spokesman, and lobbied for international nuclear cooperation. After leaving Los Alamos, Morrison returned to academia. For the rest of his life he was a forceful voice against nuclear weapons.

This is a module framework. It can be viewed online or downloaded as a zip file.

As taught in Autumn Semester 2009/2010

This module consists of a detailed examination of the critical period in Japanese history from the end of the Pacific War through the U.S. Occupation between 1945 and 1952 and recovery in the 1960s and beyond. The lectures and seminars examine the following topics:

Japan’s Road to War
The Japanese experience of war and defeat
The A-bomb in history and memory
The ‘Allied’ Occupation of Japan
The changing Japanese family
Japan’s economic recovery in the 1950s and 60s
The environmental costs of rapid economic development
The Asia-Pacific War in Japanese memory and popular culture

Suitable for: Undergraduate year one students

Dr Susan C. Townsend, School of History.

Dr. Townsend is Associate Professor of Japanese history in the School of History, University of Nottingham. She has published on Japanese intellectual history, including Yanaihara Tadao and Japanese Colonial Policy: Redeeming Empire (Curzon, 2000) and her most recent monograph Miki Kiyoshi 1897-1945: Japan’s Itinerant Philosopher (Brill, 2009). She is now developing a major collaborative project entitled Motor Cities: A Comparative History of Nagoya, Japan and Birmingham, England in the Twentieth Century in association with the University of Leicester, Birmingham City University and Nagoya University. A major focus of the project is the role of the motorcar and the automotive industry in city-centre design and regional development.

In this 7th grade humanities lesson, students make vegetable sushi and explore how Japan’s geography has influenced its diet and culture.

Although it was the Japanese who attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941, U.S. military planners decided that Germany, not Japan, was to be the primary target of operations. This lesson plan will focus on the overall strategies pursued by the Americans and their British allies in the initial months of World War II in Europe.