Message from the Dean

Creating New Understanding

Study of the humanities and social sciences is the distillation of human understanding. Our predecessors sought to live rich, full lives. They sought to live worthwhile, culturally enriched lives. Furthermore, they sought to fulfill the most fundamental of human aspirations.

The humanities and social sciences are brimming with the understanding gained by our predecessors. Humanity now faces a host of different issues, and resolving them will not be easy. That said, they must somehow be resolved somehow for humanity to chart a new course for the future. This requires that we accurately gauge such contemporary problems, that we determine their fundamental causes by looking at the past, and that we look ahead with specific remedies in mind. This will require work in the form of exploring the past, analyzing the present, and molding the future. To that end, we must learn closely from the understanding developed by our ancestors, broaden our expertise in it, and actively master techniques to examine it.

But what about spatial boundaries? Issues facing Nagoya are not limited to local problems. Rather, they are closely related to the issues confronting the state, i.e. Japan as a nation. In many instances, these issues eclipse national frameworks and even involve the international community. The School of Humanities and Social Sciences and Graduate School of Humanities and Social Sciences gauges contemporary problems in terms of time, i.e., past-present-future, and in terms of space, i.e., local community-nation-world. The two Schools are facilitating research and education to provide a glimpse of a better future and a better Nagoya, Japan, and world.

Scholarship is making progress. Based on the scholarship of the 19th and 20th centuries, we wish to craft a new scholarship for the 21st century. In the School of Humanities and Social Sciences and the Graduate Program in Intercultural Studies, students will expertly learn systems of previous understanding and study in a number of fields in an interdisciplinary and integrated manner. Along with students brimming with youthful zeal and motivation, we instructors hope to help create new understanding in order to facilitate creative solutions to the local national and international problems we face.