In Full Bloom

When National Geographic listed Ohio University as one of the best places to see cherry blossoms in the U.S., no one on the Athens Campus was surprised. After all, the annual April bloom makes an already-beautiful campus pop like no other time. The fleeting beauty of the cherry (sakura) trees—a gift from Chubu University in Japan—belies the lasting relationship between the two institutions, celebrating 50 years in 2023. And the relationship has recently survived perhaps its biggest challenge yet, a global pandemic that shut down in-person exchanges—the heart of the OHIO-Chubu partnership—for two full years. 

Case in point: Dr. Yeong-Hyun Kim, associate professor of geography, was supposed to be OHIO’s Miura Visiting Professor at Chubu in 2020. The visiting professor program is what established the relationship between Athens and Kasugai, Japan, in 1973. Her plan was to research the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, which were themselves postponed due to COVID-19. Kim pivoted and went to Chubu in 2022 and instead studied the city of Sapporo, Japan’s bid to host the 2030 Winter Olympics and what that means financially and psychologically for the host country.

“It’s a good place to go for any Ohio University professor,” Kim recalled after returning to Athens. “There is plenty of similarity between Ohio and Aichi where Kasugai is located. Aichi is a prefecture with a strong manufacturing base, and Toyota is headquartered there. It is the Japanese equivalent of the U.S. Midwest.”

Kim’s host professor was the head of Chubu’s GIS Center (geographic information systems). Kim would now like to pursue GIS research collaboration between Chubu and OHIO’s Voinovich School of Leadership and Public Service. Last summer, two Chubu students audited one of Kim’s courses online. While there, Kim reconnected with a former OHIO student who now works at Chubu’s Center for International Affairs. In addition, under Kim’s supervision, Misa Mukaigawa, a former Chubu student and a Charles J. Ping Graduate Fellow in OHIO’s International Development Studies, successfully completed her master’s project this winter. This constant expansion of relationships between OHIO and Chubu is a common theme.

In a sense, the institutions’ shared vision of international understanding, friendship and scholarship was borne out of the horrors of war. The late Dr. Tomoyasu Tanaka is considered the father of the OHIO-Chubu partnership; he and his Chubu colleague Hiroshi Katsumori were the driving force behind the Miura Visiting Professors program. Tanaka’s daughter, Norico Tanaka-Wada, referred to her father’s memoirs in which he described witnessing the atomic bomb attack of Hiroshima in 1945. “I pray deeply that never again will such a tragedy happen again on this earth,” he wrote.

To that end, Tanaka was a stalwart supporter of the OHIO-Chubu partnership. Starting in 1984, he split his time between OHIO and Chubu, where he became the first director of Chubu’s Center for International Affairs. As remarkable as Tanaka’s commitment was, the OHIO-Chubu relationship continued to thrive after his retirement (he died in 2014). 

“A lot of times you’ll have a relationship between two schools driven by one person … and when that person is not around anymore that really falls apart,” said Dr. Gerry Krzic, director of the Ohio Program of Intensive English (OPIE). “This one has endured.”

Not only has it endured, it has grown. In 1977, Chubu started sending students to Athens to study English. In 1994, Chubu students began studying for an entire term in the OPIE program. After a two-year pandemic hiatus, over 100 Chubu students studied at OHIO in 2022. 

On a chilly night last fall, Chubu exchange student Hina Uchida sat at a table in Jefferson Hall for OPIE’s International Conversation hour. She was all smiles, in a good mood because her persuasive speech in her COMS class of both American and Japanese students went well. (Her argument: Professors should assign homework that relates to students’ lives.)

“I was nervous, but I enjoyed my speech and I was comfortable more than before, (on) the first day. So I’m proud of my English,” she said.

Before conversation hour wrapped up, Krzic played emcee for trivia. After fielding some laughter-inducing answers to American trivia questions, Krzic asked the American students in the crowd of about 100, “Are you happy that Chubu students are here?” The answer was a resounding yes. “Chubu students, are you glad you came?” Another resounding yes. Finally, “In person or Zoom?” The question, of course, was rhetorical. “In person!”

The personal touch begins in the classroom and then extends beyond, both in the U.S. and Japan. American students have been studying Japanese at Chubu since 1993. Dr. Chris Thompson, who teaches Japanese and is on the Chubu University Relations Committee, has served as OHIO’s Japan study abroad coordinator since 1998 and was a Miura visiting professor in 2019. Born and raised in Japan, Thompson has long studied Japan as an ethnographer. 

While Chubu is located in central Japan (“chubu” means “central” in Japanese), Thompson’s area of expertise is northeast Japan, where Iwate Prefecture is located—the region that was devastated by a tsunami in 2011. So when the tsunami hit, Thompson was positioned to quickly rally both Japanese and American students to help with tsunami cleanup. OHIO alumni donated funds to pay transportation and lodging costs for students already in Japan to travel to Iwate.

The tsunami cleanup was classic service learning whereby OHIO students gained academic skills (Japanese language and culture) while helping meet a community need. It began with cleanup and by year two included “water volunteerism,” where volunteers took bottled water and green tea to people displaced from their homes, first to emergency shelters and then to temporary housing. But once the residents returned to permanent housing, something interesting happened.

“Even when the water was hooked up, the families still asked to have water,” Thompson said. “The water delivery became a form of contact … They remembered us. And some of the Ohio University students were getting better and better at Japanese.”

Thompson has continued to lead a service-learning project in Iwate every September, excluding 2020 and 2021 during the pandemic. Now he is expanding service learning elsewhere, including near Chubu, under the U.S.-Japan Global Engagement Project.

In short, the OHIO-Chubu partnership has weathered a global pandemic and is emerging as strong as ever, ready for the next 50 years. “What I think we learned from COVID is that technology is fine,” said OPIE’s Krzic. “It’s enhanced some things, but we’ve really realized the value of this in-person connection. Nothing beats that for education.”

Feature image by Rich-Joseph Facun, BSVC '01

Ohio-Chubu Partnership: A Timeline

1977

OHIO begins sending English language instructors to Chubu. 

1993

Ohio University students begin studying Japanese at Chubu. On average, eight OHIO students study at Chubu every year. 

2004

Chubu University celebrates its 50^th anniversary. OHIO President Roderick McDavis leads a delegation to Japan to participate in the celebration.