Hungry learners get more out of studying language and culture than Japanese Olympiad championships and good grades

Tom Keegan
Onwardtrojans.com

Alyssa Malinovsky has learned more than two Japanese alphabets and part of a third while studying the language at Chesterton High and participating in the Japanese Olympiad. She also has learned fascinating tidbits of Japanese culture.
Yet, in some ways perhaps the most important lesson she learned had nothing to do with the culture or the language. She learned not to be disappointed about what the computer kicks back at you for your class schedule until you at least get a taste of how a subject that doesn’t appeal to you on paper plays out in the classroom.
“I signed up for German and I was pretty bummed at first, but then my first day of Japanese I was like, ‘Wow, I’m so glad I didn’t take German,’” Malinovsky said. “Mrs. (Akiko) Tsugawa, she seemed nice. I was friends with her daughter. The first day in class, she talked for a good few minutes in Japanese and we were so confused, but then on the last day she said the same thing and we knew what she was saying. It was pretty cool. She gave the same little monologue.”
Mrs. Tsugawa wasn’t the first member of her family to give Japanese lessons to Malinovsky: “In kindergarten or first grade, Mrs. Tsugawa’s daughter, Mia, and I were sitting together on the bus ,and she taught me how to count to 60 in Japanese. And she tried to teach me a bunch of other stuff, but I was not a very good listener. I did not pay attention very well.”
Surely, she must be a good listener now, learning a language as demanding as Japanese and competing as well as she did at the recent Japanese Olympiad at DePauw University in Greencastle, correct?
“Not really,” she said. “I guess I do have a little bit more of an attention span than I did when I was 6.”
Chesterton won two of the three state titles awarded at the competition this year, pushing the school’s total to 25 in 24 years, and finished second in the third competition.
One competition is for teams of second-year Japanese students, another for those in their third year and the most challenging for fourth-year students.
Competitors answer questions from categories that include speaking, culture, kanji characters, proverbs, listening, geography, history, and onomatopoeic expressions, words named from the sound they make, such as “buzzing.” Onomatopoeias are more common in Japanese than English, according to John Sparks, department head of world languages and a Japanese teacher at CHS.
Sparks, who started the Japanese program at Chesterton, has been heading the school’s participation in the Japanese Olympiad since the beginning in 2002, when it was called the Japan Bowl. Back then, the Japan American Society of Washington, D.C. sponsored the competition and subsidized the trips that state winners took to D.C. for national competitions. Chesterton won three national championships and was runner-up once. After the 2005 national Japan Bowl, financial support was withdrawn for state winners, and that ended Chesterton’s national participation.
Sparks said winning two state titles and one runner-up this year was “probably our best showing in several years.”
Sparks, honored by the Association of Indiana Teachers of Japanese with the Teacher of the Year Award in 2024, prepares students for the competition with the help of Tsugawa.
“Some years you have students who want to be a part of something, but they don’t want to work that hard,” Sparks said. “This group, when they were here for our practices, they were working and they were asking questions and really were focused; just a nice, fun group of kids.”
Michael Izguerra and Hannah Welch won the third-year state championship. Conleigh Murray, Emily Ilges and Alina Summer won the second-year championship. It was the second year in a row that Izguerra was on a team that won a state championship. Jany Zhang, Ellie Johnson and Maeci Mullet placed second in the fourth-year competition.
The preparation appears to be a labor of love for the students, whose curiosity about Japanese culture is such that the more they learn the more they want to learn.
“For us, a popular game is football, but for them it would be karate or judo, very different,” said Welch, who also plays violin for the school’s advanced orchestra and the jazz orchestra. “There are a ton of different kinds (of martial arts): empty hand, sword fighting, and there is one, aikido, where your whole goal is to not hurt your opponent, just reflect their hits.”
For Mullet, “The different types of theater they have are so interesting and so diverse. There is kyogen, which is comic theater, and bunraku which is puppet theatre.”
Several students in the Japanese Olympiad spoke of how moving it was to see six women play taiko drums in Greencastle.
“It was a very physical performance, and it was really cool to see first-hand,” Izguerra said. “It was loud, too, but it was really nice, and cool.”
Added Welch: “Some of the drums are up so high it seems like a whole exercise to hold your arms up for so long. And they were really in synch.”
Izguerra said: “They said they spend at least a year practicing before they perform a specific song.”
Welch said she originally was drawn to studying Japanese because, “My stand partner in orchestra, her mom is a Japanese teacher and hearing them speak it at their house interested me. I thought it was really cool.”
Volleyball star Marissa Roe said anime originally sparked her interest in studying Japanese, “but once I got more into the class and learned more about the culture, I fell in love with everything else, every-day life in high school, and religion and stuff. They definitely have a lot more manners around strangers and other people. They respect a lot of things. They don’t take things for granted. They’re nice people who respect each other.”
Roe went on a class trip to Japan in 2023. She said “seeing all the different temples” was one of the many highlights.
Emily Ponce, who said she decided to study Japanese after hearing about it from Roe, is one of many Japanese students who finds the country’s music compelling.
“I really love the different types of instruments,” Ponce said. “The taiko drum performance we got to see was amazing. And there is this instrument called a koto, a 13-string lute. It all seemed so amazing to me, and I do want to learn how to play them too. I had seen videos of taiko drums but never in person. It’s a totally different feeling in person.”
Ria Kashyap said Mr. Sparks recognized her before she ever walked into his classroom.
“I may have an advantage because my sister (Ira) already did it,” Kashyap said. “She stared Japanese around Covid, so she would be on Zoom calls doing Japanese first thing in the morning and I would always be waking up hearing her speak Japanese, so over time I started to learn a little from that. My teacher now knew me way before I took this class because he would see me in the background of my sister’s video call.”
Murray has a trip planned to Japan this summer, five years later than she had planned.
“Covid,” Murray said of why the trip never happened. “Back in 2020, I was going to go to Japan, and I thought I might as well learn some helpful sentences, so I started learning online and I got really into it, so I decided to take it in middle school.”
Summer said she “originally was debating between French and Japanese, and I ended up going with Japanese because I kind of figured it might be a little more of a challenge because of having to learn the new characters. It was really fun, so I stuck with it.”
Murray remembered one of the Japanese sentences at the competition that her team successfully translated into English: “My dad often reads Spanish magazines.”
In preparation for the Olympiad, Johnson studied geography and onomatopoeias, Maeci studied culture, arts, sports, current events and idioms. Zhang, who runs cross country and track, studied history and delivered a clutch guess when the team figured out the first half of the sentence and couldn’t translate the second half.
“We knew, ‘You used your phone in class, so your teacher…’ We knew that part of the sentence,” Johnson said. “Jany guessed, ‘gave you a detention,’ and she was right.”
Rylin Rietman, a defensive back in the fall, finds it interesting that, “The schooling system in Japan is pretty different. It’s really common to stay after school, and school’s a lot more of a focus of the teenager’s life.”
For a group of hungry learners at Chesterton who are studying Japanese, school is a big focus as well. Malinovsky is not the only among them to become happy in a hurry that her first language choice didn’t mesh with the rest of her schedule.
“We were signing up for language classes initially. Japanese was my second option, maybe third option. I wanted to take Spanish, but I ended up in Japanese class by how it fit in my schedule,” Izguerra said. “And I really enjoyed it from Day 1.”