For the fourth time in five years, a Linfield College student has won the grand prize at the annual Toyama Cup Speech Contest, a competitive Japanese speech contest.
Michaela Duffey of Clackamas, a junior French major and Japanese minor, won first place in Level 2 and was also the winner of the grand prize, a round trip ticket to Japan to serve as a cultural ambassador in Toyama Prefecture this summer. Van Ha of Vietnam, a finance major and Japanese minor who graduated in the fall of 2015, but is currently enrolled in MLJP 485, also competed.
“Michaela is absolutely dedicated to the language,” said Chris Keaveney, professor of Japanese. “She is a French major who is among the strongest students in that program, so Japanese is her second foreign language. She actually completed the equivalent of Japanese 201 on her own while studying in France. I didn’t think that was possible.”
The Toyama Cup Speech Contest, held annually since 1996, is co-sponsored by the Toyama Prefectural Government of Japan and the Japan-America Society of Oregon, and is open to Oregon college students who are studying Japanese. It was held in Portland in April.
Level 2 competitors have studied Japanese at college or university for more than two years and have lived and studied in Japan for more than three months in the last three years. Ha studied abroad at Linfield for four years, but also used her junior year to study at Aoyama Gakuin University in Tokyo. Duffey studied abroad for a semester in France at Aix-en-Provence her sophomore year and spent the fall of her junior year at Kanto Gakuin University in Yokohama, Japan.
There were eight finalists in each level from Linfield College, University of Oregon, Portland State University, Hood Community College, Lewis and Clark College and Willamette University.
Winning the grand prize is quite an accomplishment according to Keaveney, who teaches along with Masayuki Itomitsu at Linfield. “Simply put, it is a big deal,” Keaveney said. “It is like a small market team such as the Trailblazers winning the NBA championship or the Kansas City Royals winning the World Series four out of five years.”
Since this was the 20th anniversary of the contest, former winners were also invited to attend. In attendance were Linfield alumni Lily Niland ’10 and Bryan Takano ’14, both of whom are former grand prize winners.
