‘Like Duke giving up basketball’: This Bay Area district has dominated the high school Japan Bowl for years. Now, its vaunted program may be getting the ax

Until the moment she stepped on the stage, Maya Swaminathan felt nauseous.

The 17-year-old had been preparing for months to represent San Jose’s Lynbrook High School in April at The Japan Bowl, a high-pressure national competition where hundreds of gifted students spar over Japanese language, culture and history.

She and her classmates coached each other on the flight from the Bay Area to D.C., then crammed into a hotel room to drill each other past midnight on all things Japanese. What is the name of the traditional square cloth used for wrapping gifts? (Furoshiki) Which city hosted the 1972 Winter Olympic Games in Japan? (Sapporo) What Japanese products are these regions — Shizuoka, Hokkaido and Niigata — known for producing? (Rice, tea and dairy)

Even though it was Maya’s third time at the Japan Bowl, this year, the stakes felt different. Months earlier, the team heard rumors that their school district, Fremont Union High, was planning to phase out their vaunted Japanese program over the next few years — along with those at two other schools nearby.

“We thought, maybe if we win this, we can influence the head honchos to somehow not phase out the program,” Maya said. “I felt like, even if I’m anxious, I have to do this.”

And do it, she did. During the final round of the competition, Maya hit her buzzer early to call out the name of a Japanese manga, a graphic novel, that won a cultural prize in 1997 (Fujio Fujiko’s “Doraemon”). Lynbrook brought home second place, and Cupertino High, another Fremont Union school, took first.

But it wasn’t enough. Later that month, the district announced that the rumors were true: Lynbrook, Cupertino and Monta Vista — schools that have long dominated the Japan Bowl — were planning to cut their Japanese programs due to districtwide declining enrollment. It won’t happen all at once: Starting in the 2024-25 academic year, the district will begin phasing out Japanese classes one level each year through 2027-28, when only AP-level classes will remain.

The cuts are focused on the language programs with the fewest students, though that could be re-evaluated based on enrollment in language classes this fall. Chinese at Homestead High and French at Fremont High are also in the bullseye, though all students already enrolled in those classes will be able to finish out their full course of study.

John Malott, the former president of the Japan-America Society — which has hosted the Japan Bowl since 1992 — said he couldn’t believe it when he heard the news. He sent out emails to his network with the subject line: “Don’t fall off your chair, but…”

“It would be like Duke University giving up basketball, or Maestro (Gustavo) Dudamel saying that the L.A. Philharmonic would no longer perform Beethoven,” he said. “There were years when I would watch the final championship rounds and see only those three teams on stage because no other schools in the country could come close to them. They are formidable.”

Despite their prowess, none of those schools are immune to the ripple effects of declining enrollment. Over the past five years, the Fremont Union High School District has lost 9% of its students, and its feeder K-8 districts, Cupertino Union and Sunnyvale, have seen even more staggering losses — plunges of 22% and 18% respectively from 2018-19 to today.

At the same time, enrollment in the district’s world language programs has dropped 17%.

“We know there are students in these classes that love these programs, and we don’t make these decisions lightly,” said Denae Nurnberg, Fremont Union’s data coordinator. “But this has been a long time coming.”

Many other students, parents and teachers have been mourning the anticipated loss of Japanese, Chinese and French. They’ve packed school board meetings and circulated petitions, trying to get the district to change its mind. One of those, to keep Chinese at Homestead High, has gathered nearly 1,000 signatures since late April.

“There’s a lot of anger,” said Ting-Yong Liu, a junior and Chinese language student at Homestead. “The world language program is like a second home to many of us.”