With its reorganization into a two-department structure, the Graduate School of Community and Human Services has reinforced its programs in areas such as local administration theory and NPO/NGO theory. The school has developed further through its reorganization into a three-department structure and through the addition of new faculty in the field of sports and wellness from April 2008.
The graduate school's strongest asset is its ability to conduct research on what constitutes life, welfare, community, and humanity under a solid faculty while interweaving ideas and practices from an interdisciplinary and international perspective.
Social welfare is one of the most important themes of the twenty-first century. The international community suffers from an incessant barrage of conflicts and the widening disparity between the rich and the poor. Japanese society also confronts welfare issues such as an aging society, a declining population, increased trends in juvenile crime, a weakened family structure, widening income disparities, and attenuating human relations and social maladjustment problems. Now more than ever, there is a need for the creation of a society that allows people to live a safe and secure life while respecting the characteristics, attributes, and needs of others.
With this in mind, the school has developed a comprehensive and fresh curriculum for welfare and humanities, which considers life and humanity in a multifaceted and integrated manner. To meet this ambition, it centers its curriculum on three academic disciplines: social welfare, which inquires into human welfare from a global perspective; community policy, which conducts practical and theoretical research on such issues as policy and project formulation to build and revitalize communities; and sports and wellness, which deals comprehensively with modalities of health suited to the individual's unique characteristics and attributes from the standpoint of sports and health science.
