In full bloom OHIO & CHUBU CELEBRATE A 50-YEAR EXCHANGE 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.
Photo by Rich-Joseph Facun, BSVC ’01
SPRING 2023