As Wikipedia defines it, "OpenCourseWare, or OCW, is a term applied to course materials created by universities and shared freely with the world via the internet."

Now the good news is that a number of Japanese universities have OCW projects, meaning you can watch full lectures (in Japanese) about many subjects. Here's Toudai's course list, for example. You can find others on Google.

Did you guys already know about this?

すごい!　始めた．Great! First time I've seen it. Until my Japanese is more advanced, I won't be able to make much sense of it, I suppose. But the podcasts will, at least, make for good background listening.

The best thing on the Toudai OCW site is the podcasts which have good mpeg4 video. Unfortunately these are totally disorganized and aren't integrated with the rest of the site.

Edit: also, in this case "podcast" just means that there's some sort of rss feed and it's in mpeg4 and not realplayer format; I think I'm actually subscribed to the feed but I don't believe that they update it in a way that actually makes it consumable as a podcast (by uploading episodes individually or on a regular schedule).

sweet, thanks for this.

I didn't know that OCW had classes in Japanese!

That is really cool, thanks.

Wow, seriously awesome and just what I needed!

Bookmarked. Thanks for sharing!

Cool, I didn't realize there were Japanese versions of this.

Guys, it's also worth to scan MIT, Notre Dame & other universities that are part of this...

You'll find cool stuff like this:

http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Foreign-Langua.../index.htm

MIT has some more offers for Japan and even language courses!

This is super awesome and I am (fist)bumping this thread.

All of toudai's videos are in realmedia format, is it possible to play them without realplayer, or are there any realplayer copycat programs? I installed realplayer and it well, it WORKS, but it's just so bloated and I really don't like it.

Thank you very much for posting about this here.

There are also loads of courses from Japanese universities free on iTunes U (it's in the iTunes store). This is in fact what iTunes U is all about - free content from universities.