Stuyvesant Students Taking Japanese Celebrate Japandemonium

Stuyvesant hosted Japandemonium—an annual day of exciting games and events for students taking Japanese—on May 24. Japandemonium is a fun and enriching event, similar to field days in Japanese schools, where students are divided into groups to compete in various games. These include telephone, “sweep the floor,” relay races, and obstacle courses.

Japandemonium is a Stuyvesant-unique event that Japanese language teacher Chie Helinski created with the goal of being inclusive of all levels of Japanese students. “Japan Bowl is for the elite kids [and] the top three kids who want to do it. But then there are so many other kids who may want to do it but didn’t make the team or those kids who took the language who may not be the best students, but they bring a lot of interesting things to the program,” Helinski said. “This is to celebrate the fact that they all take the same language.”

Helinski also took inspiration from her own experiences when organizing Japandemonium; she wanted her students to participate in the cultural practices of Japan. “In Japan, every fall in schools, they have a field day, and the entire school will split into two groups—a red group and a white group—and they do things like a relay and obstacle race. So [Japandemonium] is like our imitation of that field day. [...] I did those field days every year— elementary school and all the way through high school—so [I wanted to] share that experience with them,” Helinski said.

Japandemonium has developed into a staple tradition for Stuyvesant’s Japanese language program. Many former students come back to help organize each year, whether it’s to help cater, organize, or run the event. “The kids who graduated: some of them have been coming back for many years, so they kind of run [Japandemonium]. They are the emcees; they run the show; so I can step back and take photos, and I don’t have to be the person to keep the instructions,” Helinski said.

Students have found the event to be an enjoyable experience to meet others from different grades and play games, regardless of their Japanese skill level. “It was really fun. I was a freshman so I didn’t know that much Japanese, but I still had a great time. Some of it was Japanese knowledge but a lot of it was just traditional Japanese games; a lot of the time some of the older kids would help out, but there were definitely a lot of things I knew. I had a great time,” sophomore Philip Levinsky, who attended last year’s event, said.

Japandemonium gets its namesake from the first activity of the day, where students receive a stapled card hiding their team assignment. Then, all at once, they open their cards and race to find their other team members. “They’ll pick the group names, but they don’t see it; in one, two, three, they open the names and they call their names out; then it’s like a pandemonium to find group members. So Japan, the pandemonium, Japandemonium; that’s where the name came from,” Helinski said. The students then stay in their teams for the rest of the day to play a variety of Japanese games and competitions.

This year’s Japandemonium kicked off with an anpan race—a competition in which contestants raced to grab a Japanese red bean-filled bread with their teeth that was held up by organizers. “You have to run and try to catch the bread with your mouth—you jump. Someone is holding it up, and you have to jump for it and try to grab it with your mouth, and you can’t come back unless you get the bread,” junior Angelina Weng said.

The Japanese Jeopardy game, or Japardy, was another well-received game amongst the Japanese students. Students were tasked to answer Japanese-themed trivia questions by throwing a sandal with their team name on it into corresponding buckets. “The jeopardy game was pretty fun. You have a sandal; attached is your team name; and everyone takes turns throwing the sandals into the bins based on Japanese-themed questions,” sophomore Kory Chen said.

The event ended with Karuta, a Japanese card game that includes the Hiragana alphabet. “[There were] a bunch of Hiragana letters on the table that were separated by grade. You have to go against your class. Helinski would say a sentence in Japanese, and based on the first letter of the sentence, you have to go grab a card,” freshman Daniel Opara said.

Japandemonium offered invaluable insight into the Japanese language and culture while allowing students to engage in fun games. “The whole event, I had a lot of [culture-specific] questions and also had a lot of [cultural] food. The bread that we were trying to catch with our teeth—I didn’t know how it tasted before,” Opara said.

The atmosphere at Japandemonium was both competitive and lively, making it a memorable experience for the students. “It was kind of competitive, but also lighthearted. Like it was fun, and it was really exciting just competing with the others,” Opara said.

While this year’s Japandemonium was overall successful, students still believed some improvements could have been made to make the schedule and some of the games run more smoothly. “There was one game where nobody got any points because it was like telephone game, but everybody had these really loud headphones. You can barely hear the other person was saying in Japanese. Nobody got any points that game. Also, we barely had time to finish the event at the end [because] the security guards were rushing us out,” Opara said.

Some students also wish to see the return of some beloved games from previous years like tug-of-war, which they believed would have made this year’s edition of Japandemonium more memorable. “Last year, they had the tug of war event; they took it out this year, and I think it didn’t need to be taken out. I think it would’ve been really fun this year,” Chen said.

Despite these few problems, this year’s Japandemonium was still a rewarding experience that enhanced the students’ understanding of Japanese culture. It fostered teamwork and camaraderie in the tightly-knit Japanese community at Stuyvesant. “[Japandemonium] enriches your understanding [of the culture] and reinforces what you’ve learned in class,” Weng said. “It’s a bonding experience for the community itself.”