When Koki Ogawa interviews you, she looks you in the eyes. She holds a notepad but doesn’t look down at it for extended periods. She launches her questions kindly, as generous in her silence as she is with everything else.

When you ask Koki a serious question, sometimes she “giggles it away,” her Princeton roommate Navani Rachumallu says. Despite her accolades mounting to teetering heights, she’ll shrug off any question about her accomplishments. Koki – whose name means “happy princess” in Japanese – isn’t taciturn by any means, but if you ask her a question about herself, she looks up and away while speaking. Her aversion to talking about herself is borne from a deep care for others. If she’s at a table with a water pitcher, she serves everyone else before pouring her own glass. When she’s interviewing you, she nods and makes you feel heard.

Koki was born on July 17, 2003, and spent the first year of her life between Illinois and Korea. Her mom, Sarah Wittenbrink, was born in Chicago but moved to Korea after getting her Masters, falling in love there with Yukumi Ogawa, Koki’s dad. After getting Koki her American-born citizenship, the family moved back to Kyoto, finding a house near the middle school where Wittenbrink teaches English.

Wittenbrink remembers Koki as social, smart, and stubborn; despite being accepted to Doshisha, the local middle school where Wittenbrink taught, Koki independently decided in fourth grade that she wanted to go to Senri International School (SIS) – a school that was two hours away from Koki’s home on the train, and that required a written exam. They tried to dissuade the energetic ten year old, but Koki had already made up her mind.

While Koki attributes that “stubbornness,” to her dad – a master plasterer, who himself has a two-hour commute to work – it’s her mom that she says inspires her academically. A perfectionist through high school and into Princeton, she’s the first person on her father’s side of the family to attend college.

Despite her background of academic excellence – president of the World Scholar’s Club and of her school’s student council – she felt “imposter syndrome,” at Princeton. ”You’ve got people who are members of Mensa (…) I would psych myself out,” she remembers.

A junior in the anthropology department, she’s now the editor of the legal journal and director of the Asylum project. She also researches police body camera footage, and tutors with the Petey Green program, helping people who are incarcerated get their GEDs. When asked if she does anything more, she shrugs and giggles. “I probably do other things,” she says.

She doesn’t feel like an outsider anymore, but she says she still feels “behind.”

Her freshman year, Koki wrote and published an academic article on Japan’s Women-Only-Carriages (WOC) – spaces on trains designed to prevent sexual assault and harrasment, but which ignore the root causes of the issues. Recalling the sexism she faced during her four hour daily commute, and the cultural expectation of non-confrontation, she’s proud to have published in a Japanese journal; now, she wants to stand up for others.

Koki spent this last summer in New Orleans working for the Tulane Law Clinic’s Women Prison Project. There, she helped victims of intimate partner violence. In one of her cases, a woman who reported being forcefully injected drugs by her partner was still given a twenty-year sentence for having “used.” While talking about it, Koki still gets flustered.

She can admit the work was “very intense,” (autopsies were among the documents she read) but the confidentiality practices of her work block her from sharing much more than that. “You’re dealing with these very, like, emotional and traumatic moments on a daily basis,” Koki says. “You’re not allowed to have an outlet.”

Koki’s family and friends worry about the burden she takes on. Despite how little Wittenbrink knows about Koki’s work, she tears up while talking about it.

Both Rachumallu and Wittenbrink worry that Koki’s kindness and work ethic are a dangerous combination; because of how much care she imbues into all the work she does, it can sometimes be all-consuming.

Koki presents calmly, but when Red Bull becomes late-night fuel, Rachumallu notices: the room becomes messier, unfolded laundry covers LSAT prep-book pages. She thinks that sometimes, Koki cares enough for others that she doesn’t think about herself.

“I tend to define my happiness by the things that I’ve accomplished or haven’t accomplished,” Koki will admit. The day she was just accepted to the ACLU’s internship program for this upcoming summer (a job where she’ll help victims of intimate partner violence get clemency) she says she couldn’t stop thinking about a 9.6/10 she’d gotten on an assignment.

One of Koki’s earliest memories is learning about climate change in second grade. At the time, she told her parents she would solve it single-handedly. She says, “I just want to be able to be proud of what I’m doing, and to me a point of pride is being able to know that I’m helping people.”

“Like any parent, I just want my kids to be happy,” Wittenbrink says. Talking about Koki’s work over the summer, she continues: “And sometimes I look at this and I think, like, does this lead to happiness? I can’t see it.”

“But it doesn’t matter as long as she can.”


Sources:
Koki Ogawa
Sarah Wittenbrink
Navani Rachumallu
https://subsite.icu.ac.jp/cgs/images/706d19ccda7dd676b987dc6150ccd8951633c553.pdf
https://jrc.princeton.edu/people/ogawa