Top Honours Awarded in National Japanese Speech Contest (2018)

This year’s National Japanese Speech Competition (2018), held on March 24, 2018 at the University of Alberta, featured twenty-five contestants. Mako Smith, who won first place in the Open Category at the 27th Alberta District Japanese Contest, represented the University of Calgary’s Japanese Program, and remarkably, won the first prize in her category at the National Contest as well!
 

Congratulations, Mako!
 
In Mako’s speech “Nature vs. Humans”, she talked about the constant competition between nature and humans and about how humans are destroying nature, who has only accepted and provided for humans over the last 10,000 years. Mako addressed how she has been taking measures to help save the natural world and different things we can do to leave a smaller ecological footprint. She argued that the earth/nature is mad at us (humans) and that we should live with nature, not against it.
 

Mako is currently in her second year of International Business with a  minor in Japanese. Other than her love for Japan, she started taking Japanese with the goal of acquiring a job there after graduation in 2020 and creating her own business on the side. To learn more about Japanese business and the language, she will be studying a year abroad at Senshu University from 2018-2019. 

Once again, we would like to congratulate Mako Smith on her success, and deeply appreciate the hard work and assistance from our instructors. We look forward to seeing more University of Calgary students participating in the speech contest next year, and also, to see the interest this contest generates in the future.

Mako Smith first achieved top honours in the Alberta Japanese Speech Contest, held on March 3rd. She is pictured above with Mr. Kunihiko Tanabe, Consul-General, Consulate-General of Japan in Calgary (left), and Mr. Takashi Ogawa, President, The Alberta Japanese Businessmen’s Association, Sumitomo Corp.(right)

The Canada National Japanese Speech Contest was established in 1989 under the auspices of the Japanese Embassy in Ottawa in order to promote Japanese language education in Canada. Consulates General of Japan, universities and corporations have provided amazing support and assistance in making this event very successful and important to the Japanese community. Each year, many students from the University of Calgary enter the Alberta district contest, proceed to the National contest and come back with very proud results.
 

For more information on the Japanese Speech Contest, please visit:
 

CAJLE - Canada National Japanese Speech Contest 2018

The 27th Alberta District Japanese Speech Contest 2018