In the fall semester, I taught a new course I had proposed for the College of Arts and Sciences entitled "Science and Culture". I designed this course, taught in Japanese but with a bilingual (English) component, in order to introduce some of the most fundamental concepts and understandings of reality from the sciences to our first-year students, and to show where scientific ideas and discoveries interact, overlap, and influence culture (and vice versa). Though the focus of this course is on modern and contemporary science and culture, a historical approach to the subjects of science, mathematics, physics, astrophysics, and biology allowed me to frame both science and culture as historically rooted phenomena. In creating this course, I noticed that especially in the "Culture" field in our College, a certain emphasis on the relationship between religion and culture was evident. One of the aims of this course, therefore, was to balance that emphasis with an equivalent focus on the interactions between science and culture. In this way, students from the first year can understand that science too can be an exciting and deep topic of study and research within the field of "Culture" in our College.
