Kumamoto University
Graduate School of Social and Cultural Sciences

The Graduate School of Social and Cultural Sciences was established in April 2002 as a three-year independent, interdisciplinary, and comprehensive doctoral program focusing on specialized fields provided by the Faculty of Letters and Faculty of Law.

In April 2006, the Division of Instructional Systems (Master's Program), which aimed to foster e-learning professionals, was founded.

In April 2008, the new Graduate School of Social and Cultural Sciences, which provides both Master's and Doctoral Programs, was created by reorganizing and integrating the existing Graduate School of Social and Cultural Sciences, the Graduate School of Letters (Master's Program), the Graduate School of Law (Master's Program), and the Division of Instructional Systems.

The Master's Program, in addition to the traditional academic courses (8 courses), offers newly founded professional courses (7 courses)—Public Policy; Legal Profession; Negotiation, Conflict Resolution, and Organization Management; East Asian Business Communication; Cultural Administration and Curators; Japanese Language Teaching for High School; and English Language Teaching—thereby responding to a wide range of social needs.

The Doctoral Program aims to nurture highly specialized professionals as well as researchers and consists of three divisions—Cultural Sciences, which is concerned with research in various aspects of human culture and formulation of cultural policies for the contemporary society; Human and Social Sciences, which pursues development and research on policy studies of new social systems and their theoretical grounding; and Instructional Systems—thereby providing an opportunity for experienced students, foreign students, and those who have completed the Master's Program.