Fox Cities News

Lawrence University's first-year student, Kai Ohara, has been awarded the prestigious Critical Language Scholarship (CLS) and will be heading to South Korea this summer. The CLS is a highly competitive scholarship funded by the U.S. Department of State, with approximately 500 recipients chosen annually from over 5,000 applicants.

As a CLS Fellow, Ohara will spend two months in Gwangju, a city located in the southwest part of South Korea. Here he will engage in an intensive language and culture program, taking a pledge to use only Korean and dedicating 15 hours per week to language and culture instruction.

Ohara explained his motivation for applying to the program: “In my application essay, I wrote about moving from America—where Americans of Japanese or Korean descent often share a sense of solidarity and identity as Asian-Americans—to Japan, where Koreans are viewed as the ‘other’ and cultural distance is often emphasized over cultural similarity." He added that his experiences conversing with friends of Korean descent in both countries led him to develop an interest in Korean culture and history. "I hope that studying abroad in Korea this summer will help to add context and nuance to my understanding of the complicated political, historical, economic, and soft-power relations between all three countries—Korea, America, and Japan.”

In preparation for his summer program, Ohara is currently undertaking an independent study in the Korean language under Matty Wegehaupt, instructor of East Asian studies at Lawrence University.

Ohara moved to Japan after high school where he spent a yobikou year preparing for college. He decided to return to the U.S. for his undergraduate studies "to support my interdisciplinary interests—law, computing and data science, music theory, linguistics, economics, and global studies—with a more classically liberal-arts style education.”

He discovered Lawrence University through the Waseda exchange program which allows students from Tokyo’s Waseda University to spend an academic year at Lawrence. “I was intrigued by the curricular flexibility to take music theory courses even as a non-Conservatory student,” Ohara said. His interests lie especially in intellectual property law, which intersects with forensic musicology, the application of analytical music theory to resolving copyright disputes.