Nine Harker students traveled to Washington, D.C., in early April for the 2010 National Japan Bowl competition. All three Harker teams made the final round, ultimately placing first in Level II, second in Level III and second in Level IV.

Japan Bowl is an academic competition that tests the achievements of high school students studying Japanese in the United States. The competition tests not only the students’ language skills but also their knowledge of proverbs and onomatopoeic (words that represent sounds, like “buzz” and “hiss”) expressions as well as various cultural elements.

Each year, the competition tests different non-language questions, and this year’s non-language questions included extensive topics such as the history of the showa and heisei periods, haiku, folk tales, demography, transportation, communications infrastructure and mass media, economy, business, Japanese artifacts, anime and manga and more.

Teams were:

Level II: Shilpa Nataraj, team captain, Gr. 10; Crystal Chen, Gr. 10; and Meera Madhavan, Gr. 9.

Level III; Tiffany Jang, team captain, Gr. 10; Victoria Liang Gr.11; and Lorraine Wong, Gr. 9.

Level IV: Kelly Chen, team captain, Gr. 12; Katie Liang, Gr. 11, and Jerry Sun, Gr. 11.