The following courses are provided in English during the Fall and Winter term.

Accounting in Japan

The purpose of this course is to provide students with opportunities for reviewing current Empirical Accounting Research. Each student is assigned to several research articles published in top Accounting journals such as The Accounting Review, Journal of Accounting and Economics, Journal of Accounting Research and Contemporary Accounting Research, and prepares approximately 30 slides for a 90-minutes presentation to review each assigned article. The presenters are expected to summarize the contents of the papers and to critically assess the pros and cons of them. The topics covered in this course include but are not limited to financial statement analysis, equity valuation, value relevance of accounting information, earnings management, conservatism, corporate governance, IFRS adoption, and voluntary disclosure. The basic knowledge of elementary Econometrics is required.

Japanese Business Environment

This course examines Japanese business environments, especially, its economy, companies, markets and consumers. This course will consist of lectures, case discussions, and team projects. In the team projects, our students are expected to “explore” Japan by themselves.
The following topics will be covered in this course;

I. Japanese economy
- An overview of Japanese economy from the 1950s to 2010s
- Problems of non-performing loans
- Strength of the Japanese Economy
- Issues for the future: national economic burden, utilization of foreign work force, and impacts of demographic changes on Japanese economy

II. Japanese companies
- Structure & corporate governance; international comparison
- Organizational learning and purchase-supply relations in Japan

III. Japanese markets and consumers
- Characteristics of Japanese consumers and markets
- How to achieve success in Japan: entry barriers and key success factors in the Japanese markets

Assessment is ongoing throughout the course and is based on student participation in both lectures and group works.

Financial Management in Japan  

This course is comprised of lectures, case studies, and discussions with industry guest speakers. This course has two principal goals: to bridge the gap between finance theory and Japanese finance practice; and to introduce students to the international finance community

General Management in Japan 2: Entrepreneurship

The objective of the course is to learn management practices of entrepreneurship and to nurture future entrepreneurs, who are also expected to easily cross national borders in their venture business activities related to Japan. Venture business and entrepreneurship constitute the very foundation of modern economies anywhere in the world. It is about the time that Japan, the second or third largest economy in the world, started to re-engineer its venture eco-system and exciting new companies will once again emerge and grow.　The course will utilize the case method teaching and will use various cases published by Harvard Business School, the instructor’s alma mater, and by other institutions, related to entrepreneurship in Japan, while bringing in successful Japan-related global entrepreneurs as our guest speakers in order to expose the students to the true stories of entrepreneurship in the real world.
Also, during the semester, Groups（“Companies”）of four to six students will be formed and will
participate in a business plan competition to be waged toward the end of the semester. The presentation will be judged by‘ real world’ entrepreneurs/venture capitalists and the instructor.

General Management in Japan 1: Strategic Management with Social Impacts

In this course, we will examine the impact of technologies on firm strategies at the base of the economic pyramid (BOP) in Asia and Africa. Target markets include such countries as Indonesia, Vietnam, Cambodia, India, Bangladesh, Tanzania, and Nigeria
After surveying basic theories and methodologies related to strategies at the BOP market, various topics will be covered with case discussions and guest speakers. Those topics include: the possibility to achieve both social and economic value, sources of competitive advantages at the BOP market, the role of ICT, the concept of “impact investing”, microfinance, net-based businesses in BOP, the applicability of prediction markets and the wisdom of crowds in BOP, and so on.

Management Science in Japan: Quantitative Analysis and Applications

This course combines lectures and case studies. Course objectives are to understand quantitative methodologies and to bridge the gap between the methodologies and their practical use. Lecture covers basic theories and methodologies related to quantitative methodologies for management.
Those topics include: probability, market research, conjoint analysis, market growth forecasting, product life cycle, customer lifetime value and so on.
By the end of the course, you will learn the basic concepts of quantitative inference. Also, the modern quantitative methodologies to extract useful information from data will be learned. Importantly, an idea for using them in practice is acquired.

Marketing in Japan

The aim of this course is to deepen the students' understanding of marketing operations in Japanese companies. The first half of the course will consist of lectures on Japan's marketing and distribution systems, while in the second half, students will divide into groups for field studies on marketing operations in actual companies. At the end of the course, students will be required to submit reports and give presentations on their findings.

Multinational Organizations and Strategy: Organization Management in Japan II

This course focuses on the international dimensions of organizations and strategy, and provides frameworks for analyzing international business environment, formulating global strategies, and designing multinational organizations in an increasingly complex world economy. We delve into the theoretical frameworks as well as practical skills that managers need to deploy to help their firms stay ahead of their competitors. Class discussions will be based on lectures, readings, and case analysis on Japanese and non-Japanese multinational corporations.

Organization Management in Japan I

The lecture deals with the distinctive features of Japanese organization.
It especially focuses on the human resource management system and its social background. In addition, it may consider the contrast of the Japanese and the Anglo-Saxon models.

Production Management in Japan

The purpose of this course is to furnish the students with understanding the characteristics of Japanese way of production management, operations management and operations strategy and their ongoing changes.

The course is composed of a series of lectures, case discussions and plant tours, which will facilitate understanding of the matters with a wide scope, not only from theoretical and phenomenal aspects but also from historical and socioeconomic viewpoints. The active discussion among credit exchange students and Keio students will help achieving the above objectives.

Specifically, the course is comprised of several visits to advanced Japanese factories and a couple of lectures featured on Japanese way of production management. At the beginning of the course, students learn about a framework for analyzing pros and cons of production management using several case studies on Japanese factories. The framework is comprised of such factors of 4M, supply chain, value added and waste, and cause and effect relationship. The framework are applied to plant visits, modified and developed through group discussion at the visited factories, and the final version of the framework is presented, together with major findings at plant visit, at the last session of the course.

Business Logistics―Japanese-style Marketing and Distribution

Since the advent of Japan as one of the world’s top economic powers during the latter part of the twentieth century, academic and journalistic interest has focused on uncovering and explaining the characteristics of Japanese corporate business and marketing methods. Especially during the 1980s and 90s, many experts have sought to unravel the secrets behind the success of Japanese marketers in foreign markets and have tried to explain the peculiarities of the Japanese market to foreign marketers. In spite of a recent shift of attention from Japan to China —as a result of the economic ascendance of China on the one hand and the relative decline of the Japanese economy on the other— Japan remains one of the world’s largest and most sophisticated markets and remains a very important market for many foreign marketers.
In this course we will focus our attention primarily on the Japanese consumer-marketing environment and will take an in-depth look at relevant characteristics of marketing, distribution, advertising, and consumer behavior in Japan. In doing so, our primary focus will be on the characteristics of Japanese consumers, how these characteristics have evolved over time, and how consumer behavior affects the various aspects of corporate marketing strategies and tactics of both Japanese and foreign companies operating in the Japanese market.
The course is organized around student presentations and class discussion of key readings from the relevant academic and trade literature. In addition, we will read and discuss a number of cases that will illustrate how both foreign and Japanese companies have dealt or are dealing with the peculiarities of the Japanese marketing environment. In each session, a different group will present the readings for that session. The instructor will primarily act as a facilitator and coordinator of the class discussions and will conduct mini lectures to clarify the assigned readings and put them in a larger perspective.
At the end of the course, participants will individually submit a report in which they critically discuss and synthesize the readings. Readings, summaries, reports and class discussion will be in English. Students will work in groups to present the readings and cases.