The US Department of Defense through the Fulbright Scholarship Program has been offering scholarships for American college students to study certain critical need languages for up to a year in order to build up America's foreign language proficiency and cross-cultural understanding.
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There's some cool languages on this list and I always thought it would be fun to go to a whole different culture for a year on the US Gov and study a foreign language. Eligible Languages:
Arabic (all dialects), Azeri, Bahasa Indonesia, Bangla/Bengali, Chinese (Mandarin only), Farsi, Gujarati, Hindi, Korean, Marathi, Pashto, Punjabi, Russian, Tajik, Turkish, Urdu and Uzbek.

Japanese is not on the list and it made sense to me - with all the people studying Japanese and who are intersted in Japanese culture, there's no need to put forth a scholarship for people to study it. Guess I was wrong...

For the 2010 Critical Language Scholarships for Intensive Summer Institutes program Japanese is one of possible languages! Applications will be posted online tomorrow and the deadline is December 18th. While they haven't posted exactly which universities/language schools scholars will be studying at, the chance to spend this summer in Japan looks too awesome to pass up. Japanese language classes are only available for the Intermediate and Advanced level, which is perfect for someone who will have taken a year of Japanese at the college level. However, I think someone who's motivated could get a tutor or self study enough before that time.

Here's the other awesome languages being offered for the summer and the levels you can study at:
Arabic, Persian: Advanced beginning, intermediate or advanced level; Azerbaijani, Bangla/Bengali, Hindi, Indonesian, Korean, Punjabi, Turkish, or Urdu: Beginning, intermediate or advanced level; Chinese, Japanese, Persian, or Russian: Intermediate or advanced level.

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Best of luck to all applicants, no matter which language you wish to study!