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Geography

Tying Knowledge of the Earth and Humanity Together with “Place” to Survive Intellectually

Where are you now on planet Earth? Once you know your own position, you’ll naturally want to know what kind of place you are in. What forms of society and nature are found there, and what kinds of principles led to their formation? Various questions spur new interests one after the other.

Curiosity and an interest in the Earth and humanity are indispensable to surviving intellectually in this world. Geography addresses these questions by exploring the places you specialize in so that anyone anywhere can share your experience and knowledge. Geography is a broad field that goes beyond the framework of Earth and humanity to consider the nature, society and people of a specific place with a strong interest based on keywords such as space, environment, landscape, and region. It is an ideal discipline for students with an inquisitive nature.

Objective: Fostering Local Knowledge and Practical Skills

Geography is an integrated science that considers and ties together knowledge in the Earth and humanity as part of the university’s education and research on the local scale. Geography also features the elements of applied and policy science in the sense that it inspires solutions to various realistic problems in society. This program fosters the multi-scale geographic sense and knowledge necessary to solve real problems on the local, national and global scales, in areas including economic stimulation, regional planning, urban issues, issues related to the declining birthrate and the aging population, welfare, disaster prevention, environmental issues and others.

Most of our program graduates enter fields that take advantage of their specialty. This includes civil servants working in regional and traffic planning departments, as well as graduates working for private corporations such as the media, railways, department stores, construction and real estate, information systems, map construction, think tanks and so on. Practical and applied skills in geography are put to work.

Features: Respect a Wide Range of Themes and Skills

Students in the Geography program attain a wide range of geographical knowledge through lectures and seminars on topics such as economics, society, cities and the environment. To learn about geography’s unique analytical perspectives and methods, students also take courses in subjects such as fieldwork (around the Tokyo area and throughout Japan), maps and GIS, regional statistical analysis, questionnaire surveys, and field observations.

This curriculum gives students basic geographical skills and a geographical sense that enables them to think in terms of place and region about the problems facing Earth and humanity that fields such as the liberal arts and humanities, sociology, and natural science raise. In their graduation theses, students apply the knowledge, skills and sense they have gained through their classes to research based on themes set in any region each student pursues. Geography students may choose from a wide range of themes when writing their graduation theses.