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08 Jun 2014 @ 7:06pm
Lieutenant JG Kouta Jiang
Name Kouta Jiang Ph.D.
Position Sociologist
Rank Lieutenant JG
Character Information
| Gender | Male | |
| Species | Human | |
| Age | 36 | |
| Date of Birth | April 19th, 2353 | |
| Place of Birth | Ōkura, Mogami, Yamagata, Japan |
Character Type
Starfleet ID
| Serial Number | IX-100-3391 | |
| Security Clearance | Level 5 | |
| Duty Watch | Beta |
Physical Appearance
| Height | 5'9" | |
| Weight | 142lbs | |
| Hair Color | Soft black | |
| Eye Color | Dark brown | |
| Physical Description | With a slender body offset by toned musculature appropriate for his more lithe frame, delicate facial features framed by a strong jaw, and broad shoulders hidden beneath a mess of thick loose waves that hang in lazy layers down to his shoulder blades, Kouta's appearance could almost be described by some as a conflict of interests. Kouta himself, however, is quite at home in his unorthodox appearance, holding himself with a comfortable, approachable sort of confidence that seems to fit with his attempts to wear his civilian wardrobe as often as he can get away with without getting himself in trouble. Said wardrobe is as laid back as the man himself, consisting of mostly fitted jeans, t's, v-necks, and zippered hoodies, with only the occasional embellishment of necklace or bracelet, save for a seemingly ever-present locket worn around his neck and thicker rimmed, small rectangular glasses with rounded edges needed to correct nearsightedness. He'll rarely tie his hair up in anything more than a ponytail and seems quite content to look particularly unremarkable; his simple, clean-cut preferences carry over to uniform and formal attire as well. |
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| Portrait |  |
Family
| Spouse | Lunoa Rowae, LCSW (deceased) | |
| Children | Li Shi (deceased) Rusui (deceased) Romi (deceased) Mai (deceased) |
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| Father | Ichirou Sato | |
| Mother | Xing Li Jiang (deceased) | |
| Other Family | Ieca Rowae, ex-mother-in-law |
Personality & Traits
| General Overview | Kouta is, in a word, calm. Level headed under pressure and easygoing when at rest, he is typically counted amongst pleasurable company to have around by most. While in no way unsocial, Kouta is generally a quiet man and more of a listener than a talker, though seems to always have something worth listening to when he does have input. He takes his work very seriously, throwing hours of focused research into the tiniest details, often neglecting his own basic needs in favor of his work. He also is not one to have the most orthodox approach, either; considered perhaps an eccentricity to an otherwise gentle man, Kouta's tendency to want to dive headfirst into a culture with wild abandon in order to learn about it from the ground up has not always been seen as the most respectable - or safest - route. Not that he pays much mind to the criticism - he's usually too busy talking hot topics of the day over drinks and cards at a local bar, or helping with the day-to-day in poor neighborhoods. He's far from all work and no play, however, and is easy to laugh and quick with a smile. Despite his quiet nature, or perhaps because of it, his own sense of humor seems to manifest in the form of subtle wit, a quick comment or sassy remark slipped in so casually it can almost be missed if you're not paying enough attention; plus, an unfortunate love of bad puns. Regardless of his often groan worthy repertoire, he does well at social gatherings, even when mostly contributing only quiet and laughter, and makes an amicable companion - if you can pry him out of his office. On a more personal level, individuals will find Kouta to be profoundly understanding, honest, and accepting, founded on his genuine desire and readiness to understand a person's reasons for doing what they do and being how they are. He holds a strict 'open door' policy, and while he typically never actively seeks out explanations or promises he'll be able to do more than offer amateur advice, he's discovered that other's have displayed a willingness to confide in him. He is free with his opinions when asked, tactful rather than blunt, and substantially less so with his personal feelings, charismatically weaving around the subject to redirect the conversation elsewhere unless it suits him. |
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| Strengths | — Calm and level-headed, allowing him to function well under pressure. — Strong natural empathy, allowing him to more easily grasp concepts, beliefs, and understand behaviors in other peoples and cultures that is helpful not just in his research, but in normal socialization. — Insightful and observant, usually attributed to his 'listen rather than speak' nature. — Extremely physically fit, years of training in the Chinese martial art Chángquán has given him great flexibility, control, and athleticism; one that he practices these days almost exclusively in long form for meditative and exercise purposes only, however. — He has a gift for multitasking. — He is a fairly accomplished violinist, though he insists that is due to training only, not talent. |
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| Weaknesses | — His ability to stay calm under pressure has, on occasion, made him appear apathetic to the plights and feelings of others. While the reality is quite the contrary, it has caused him some headaches in the past nevertheless. — He's a very diligent worker - too ¬diligent, sometimes. Kouta has on many occasion 'forgotten' to eat and/or sleep because he's gotten too wrapped up in what he was doing. He can be particularly stubborn about stopping, too; very much a 'five more minutes' type of mindset. — He can be very careless in how he chooses to execute his 'field research'. To most, he would appear less a scientist and more an activist or a care-worker, getting himself directly involved in local cultures, groups, and goings-on - and usually a lot of trouble - than taking the safer 'observe and document' approach. — Orphans and children of misfortune are his proverbial Achilles heel; he goes well out of his way to help as he can, and they are one of the few triggers that gets any form of temper out of him. — He has an unfortunate tendency to point out his observations of people - seemingly out of the blue - and not always welcome. — In stark contrast to his outwardly serene temperament, Kouta's work and living space could easily be described as chaotic. Notes, papers, clothes, knick-knacks, and the like all scattered around in a piled clutter; which, somehow, he always seems able to find stuff in. He's definitely not dirty, but disorganized? Oh yes. — Despite the fact he'll remain silent for long periods of time in social situations, he'll sometimes talk or mumble to himself when he's thinking or working out problems, usually seamlessly switching between the three of what he considers to be his 'native' languages without noticing. 'It's not crazy until you start answering yourself', so he says. — He's at least 5 minutes late to everything. |
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| Ambitions | Kouta's not a particularly ambitious person, in the traditional sense. While he'd very much like to explore a great many different places and get to know a great many different groups of people, really, he's just happy floating along, 'doing what he does'. | |
| Hobbies & Interests | — It might come as a surprise to some, but Dr. Jiang spends an alarming amount of time glued to his PADD browsing the Galactic Computer Network. He's particularly mum on what he's actually doing on there, but one may occasionally catch him chuckling at the screen or typing away at something. — Less surprisingly, he also enjoys literary pursuits for fun. He's fond of poetry, most of all. — As mentioned earlier, Kouta is extensively trained in Chángquán. It's an art he keeps up regularly, though usually privately, and usually in long form only for meditation and exercise. — On that note: he meditates regularly, and his meditations do not exclusively involve Chángquán. He considers it one of the few ways to 'unjumble his head'. — He has a great love for music, one of his few passions outside of his normal scope that he attributes in large part to his mother. He'll be caught listening to music more often than not, and he keeps up his own pursuits with his well-worn violin in the free time he allows himself. |
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| Vernacular | A middling baritone, Kouta's voice rings confident, though kindly so rather than arrogant. He sounds generally upbeat and pleasant, although it's more like he's in a consistent, comfortably good mood than exuberant or chipper. Despite being raised in a multi-lingual household where federation standard was one of the three languages primarily spoken, Kouta does still have something of an accent of a predominantly Japanese nature, given it was the language he heard and spoke most often in his childhood. Mixed pronunciations cling to his sentences and he's never been able to shake the occasional colloquialism, but it's nothing to the point of causing misunderstanding; more of an endearing quirk, if anything. | |
| Orientation | Bisexual | |
| Language(s) Spoken | Japanese [native], Chinese (Mando) [native], Federation Standard, Betazed, and some mixed bits, pieces, and 'conversational' (yes, no, 'where's the toilet', etc) type phrases from some Federation races due to his travels, though not enough to truly note |
| Personal History | It should come as no surprise that a person with such a colorful personality would come from a life equally so. The child of intellectual lineage and very deep pockets, one would expect that history to be one of a happier hue; sadly, that's rarely the case, and Kouta is no exception. His parents were an arranged marriage, his father, Ichirou, from a declining 'old money' family trying to secure their place in a dying, pointless aristocracy, and his mother, Xing Li, the daughter of a 'nouveau riche' mechanic, just trying to secure a happy future for his only child. The deceptions ran deep, and by the time the real motivations became clear, the marriage had come to be and the patron of the Jiang family was no longer around to put an end to it. Ichirou, a doctor in a long line of prestigious names, wore his disdain for his wife on his sleeve, who had no profession and simply liked to care for others. A man mired in dilapidated traditions, she defied all that a woman and wife should be to his standards. He was a harsh, cruel man, xenophobic and bigoted to boot, and it was no surprise that Xing Li tried often to escape him or bore the marks of failed attempts. So much was his cruelty and his obsession with outdated tradition and 'familial honor' that his quest for an heir left Kouta's conception itself a darkly shadowed subject. Xing Li was put under a very gilded house arrest during her pregnancy, yet despite it all, if anything brought joy to her life since her marriage, it was her young son. Kouta was born healthy, without complication, and she loved him unconditionally. However, he quickly became a tool his father used to control his mother's 'disgraceful' behavior - helping others, being accepting of those different than herself - by threatening regularly to take him away from her, saying she'd 'infect' his sole heir with her ideals. However, his constant threats blew up in his face; with outside help from the friends she'd made, she was able to slip away with her infant son. She enlisted as a civilian on a Starfleet vessel and was gone before her husband could react. Ichirou, the now patron of an old and prestigious family name, who had not an ounce of actual power and was tied to his wife's purse strings; the wife who had been able to secretly make arrangements to lock him out of her funds and was now light-years away with his only heir. Kouta was raised on starships, traveling with his mother all over Federation space where she taught him acceptance, patience, and caring. It was during these early years of his life where he first developed his interest and appreciation for other cultures, nurtured by his mother's encouragement and participation in care-work and support systems. The happy times couldn't last forever, though. Shortly after his ninth birthday, Kouta's mother was slain by the people she was attempting to help - a desperate act by desperate people, one that was regretted. In a day, the child lost the only life he'd ever known, gained an effectively pointless but ever-increasing fortune he didn't want, and was shipped off to live with his only surviving family; a man he had no memory of, but feared more than anything. And the fear was rightly placed: from day one, Ichirou laid on nine years worth of abuse for the imagined slights and disgraces Xing Li had cause him to suffer; it had been through sheer cleverness that he'd been able to keep the family name he cherished so much from diving into the filth, or so he'd say, as he layered on the castigation. Unsurprisingly, Kouta grew to hate him quickly. The more his father pushed him into situations to supposedly 'cleanse' him, the more he acted against him, finding anything he could do to make a fool of his father with little regard to how he himself looked. So much was his father's anger that threats of simply getting rid of this 'embarrassment of a son' started spilling out of his mouth more openly; it was the piling, meaningless inheritance Ichirou was so obsessed with, to which Kouta was the sole beneficiary, that stopped him. They mutually knew he was simply buying his time to figure out some way to steal the fortune before Kouta reached legal age, and then... The prodigal son himself was too bitter and angry to care at that point; though, he did take some solace in learning and did quite well at school, where he tried to spend as much of his time as he could to get away. It was there, around the age of 16, where he met a like-minded young man, shy, struggling in his own ways, and they found a sort of comfort in each other. It was the type of relationship that Ichirou was very not okay with. A rebellious Kouta ran away to his beau's and hid for a time before being forcibly dragged home by henchmen of Ichirou's household. It resulted in one of the more violent confrontations of his teenage years, and in a show of absolute control, Ichirou announced he'd arranged for a marriage between Kouta and a young woman whose name he has long forgotten, some relationship that was correct and clean, a respectable and dignified match, that would send him far away to live at her estate. The wedding would be expedited, and he forced his son under a house arrest so as not to risk embarrassing him further or wrecking the arrangement; but it was not one that kept the furious youth trapped for long. In a shameless act of fury and desperation, Kouta hunted down his boyfriend, 'acquired' several images of a very distinct nature, and broadcast them to not only his father, but this dignified family he was supposed to marry into. Naturally, the betrothal was broken off immediately, and such was Ichirou's fury that he lost care for the money he had infatuated over for so many years to fuel his long-dead customs; Kouta was able to escape the potentially deadly encounter without pursuit. Kouta didn't wander too far, though, living awkwardly but freely, and happily forgetting about the fortune that haunted him; the Federation tried to provide everyone with a comfortably adequate standard of living, and he certainly didn't care if he lived in a room the size of a closet or a mansion. He occupied the time he used to spend in captivity or screaming matches with any little odd-jobs he could get his hands on, and focused intensely on his studies once again, allowing him to finish off school with excellent marks. But the magnitude of the events of his past lingered all around him, and when his boyfriend finally rejected him when discussion of plans after graduation came 'round, telling him he brought too much trouble, he found himself at a loss; what was left here for him? Then it occurred: this place had never been home anyway. He enlisted in the Starfleet Academy immediately; his choice of field, Sociology, seemed obvious to him, given he now had the freedom to explore his own passions again, and he found a kind of peace in his life once more. He threw himself into his education, and the years flew by before he'd even noticed. Hungry for more knowledge, but eager to get back into the stars, he took enough time to enroll himself to further his degree at Princeton - a dual major of Sociology of Culture/Social Stratification (and a minor in music, for good measure) - which he'd be able to complete while mobile with the help of holo-technology and the Galactic Computer Network, and got himself on the first ship he could. It was during one of his first missions he met Lunoa Rowae, LCSW, a young Betazoid woman who came aboard to assist and decided to stick around thereafter. He was as fascinated by her and the stories of her past as she was with him, and their romance was quick and intense: at 23, they held a traditional Betazoid wedding to celebrate their union. At 24, their first child was born, a young girl they named Li Shi in honor of Kouta's mother, and with love never-wavering, their family continued to grow: the fraternal twins Romi and Rusui, the only other boy in the family, came when Kouta was 25, and their youngest, a little girl they named Mai, when he was 27. Despite all the trials and tribulations of family life and Starfleet obligations, they were inescapably happy. Kouta graduated from Princeton with his Ph.D. when he was 28, and it was shortly thereafter that his life once again took a dramatic turn. He'd been given temporary shore leave to attend the ceremony for his graduation, though it wouldn't be until shortly after that his family would be able to arrive, and they intended to spend a short vacation in celebration before returning to space. But after all the pomp and circumstance, when they should have been arriving, Kouta received only a message: there'd been an accident, a malfunction in the impulse drive of the shuttlecraft transporting his family. No one on the shuttlecraft had survived. Kouta was on a ship to Betazed as soon as possible to be with his wife's family, where he was given extended leave to handle his affairs and attend the first meeting of the Visitation for his lost loved ones. He found comfort there amongst his extended family, but when the time of Visitation ended, he was happy to return to Starfleet with his work and an objective to give him focus, where it and the people he was able to meet along the way because of it helped him make his peace with things. After the sixth month since the accident, he once more returned to Betazed for the second Visitation, and did again every three years after, always making a quick return to the stars. But outside of those small leaves, Kouta has spent every moment since the accident on a ship - quite happily so, in fact - unless someone has pointedly dragged him off one or a mission called him to put his feet on the ground, so to speak. And, even then, it's hard to keep him grounded for long - as expected, Dr. Jiang will insist that 'home is where the warp core is'. |
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| Starfleet History | Kouta jumped eagerly into Starfleet Academy, and through his four years put all that he had in to his education. To onlookers it may have appeared like he never left the classroom, but to him, it felt as though class never truly got started - he was barely graduated, and decided he would satiate his hunger for knowledge in his own way, getting into space almost as soon as stepping off campus, and enrolling to further his education at Princeton, without the slightest hint of hesitation despite the social and political climate of the time. Kouta's actual career since has been mostly smooth, outside the occasional complaint on punctuality or uniform presentation, but so long as he's been fee to pursue his work Kouta has been more than happy to simply do what he does, and does well. |
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| Medical History | None of note. | |
| Service Record | 2371 - 2375 — Starfleet Academy 2375 - 2378 — USS Levi; sociologist 2378 - 2383 — USS Comperio; sociologist 2383 - 2386 — USS Xiaobo; sociologist 2386 - 2389 — USS Seragaki; sociologist 2389 - 2390 — USS IJsselmeer; sociologist 2390 — USS Galileo; sociologist |
Character Progression System
| CPS Option | DISABLED |
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