Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) is a discipline, which investigates the human society and existence starting from the relationships between nature and people reinterpreting our individual lifestyle and behaviors in light of sustainability.
In the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, ESD is considered a fundamental subject, which can be taken since the first year, and aims explaining the models for creating sustainable societies. A challenging target of this subject is to reexamine what we tend to consider as “obvious” going through various issues related to sustainability. The themes connected with the problems of sustainability in international societies can be divided into global-scale issues and local-scale issues, which can be further analyzed from three perspectives: humans and nature, self and others, individual and society. ESD takes into consideration the modalities through which these twelve themes have an impact on our individual lives. Students are invited to transpose the awareness earned during the ESD course to their fields of specialization for mastering the necessary knowledge and skills to create a sustainable society.
Contemporary problems such as climate changes, economic disparities, and financial crisis are constantly sharpening. This situation becomes clear when we observe the present climate anomalies or economic instabilities. Despite the gravity of things many persons are caught in the ordinariness of their lives and do not pay attention to the serious implications of these type of problems. In the contemporary international society the core of such problems is constituted by the individual life-style of each one of us.
ESD is an educational activity, which embraces various issues such as peace, multiculturalism, and environmental preservation in relationship with sustainability as well as their effects on our lifestyle and occupations. Studying the various difficult situations in which some people have to spend their lives, it is possible to grasp the causes of these complications from different angles and think about the connections between these problems and one’s life. In other words, ESD focuses on the capacity to create a society where everyone is free to live her own life without leaving nobody behind such as children, young people, adults, elders, people with different abilities, women, men, sexual minorities, native populations, people coming from abroad, teachers, and workers.

Because of interrelated global problems such as environmental degradation, war, terrorism, ijime(bulling), or domestic violence our society is on the verge of an acute crisis. If we do not take action now, the sustainability of human society will be irreversibly doomed. To solve these problems cheap measures are not enough. We need to develop a vast and specialized knowledge on humans, societies, and cultures. At the Graduate School of Humanities & Social Sciences it is possible to make interdisciplinary research about specific fields of knowledge, which allow to cast a direct glance on the future of human society.
At the Post-Graduate School students analyze their specific research areas learning from specialized teachers as well as experts in other disciplines. In this sparkling environment different types of graduate students can make research activities benefiting from continuous interactions and exchanges with other students from heterogeneous fields of knowledge.
Those persons who are not completely satisfied with the undergraduate training and want to experience a full-immersion in a rich research-life, or those who have a strong interest in Japanese culture and society and are looking for a serious analysis of the future human society are very welcome to joying our intellectual community.