34th National Japan Bowl Volunteer Sign-up

Thank you so much for your interest in volunteering at the 34th National Japan Bowl competition! This year, the National Japan Bowl will be held on Friday and Saturday, April 17-18 at Johns Hopkins University SAIS campus in downtown DC.

Please fill out all sections of this form by Friday, April 3 and we will get back to you soon with more information. If you should need to exit this form for any reason, click "Save" and you can return to complete it later.

Japan Bowl volunteers cover a wide variety of tasks like: 

• assistance with event check-in, 
• competition monitoring, 
• ushering & escorting guests and students, 
• room set-up & tear-down,
• and more. 

We ask all volunteers to please be open to assisting with all tasks as requested on-the-day and to let us know in advance if there are any tasks you are unable/unwilling to assist with. 

It’s important to note that that Japan Bowl roles and tasks are dynamic and may change depending on how many (or how few) volunteers we need for a certain task.  

So please, as much as possible, be flexible and willing to help out where needed... and most of all, have fun!  

 

A list of volunteer roles can be found here.

The 34th National Japan Bowl will be held on Friday and Saturday, April 17-18, 2026 at the Johns Hopkins School for Advanced International Studies (SAIS) in downtown Washington DC.

We will bring in about 40-50 volunteers to help us across the two days of the event (Fri-Sat), but we would also like the support of a few volunteers in the days leading up to the event (Wed-Thurs).

We plan on scheduling our volunteers in shifts of at least 4 hours and up to 8 hours in length. 4-hour shifts will receive a 15 minute break and a snack, while shifts over 6 hours will receive a half hour break and a meal.

If you are not available for at least 4 hours at a time, that's alright! Let us know your availability and we will see what we can do.

While speaking Japanese can be helpful in some roles, it is neither required nor expected of our volunteers.

Within one to two weeks following your submission of this volunteer sign-up form, you will receive a link to a training video outlining event details and logistics.

Additionally, prior to the event, we schedule a venue walkthrough so that all of our volunteers will be able to see the event space prior to the event. The venue walkthrough usually takes place between 10am and 5pm on a weekday in late March/early April. We understand that not everyone will be available for this.

You will receive the training video link and be notified of the scheduled walkthrough date via email. Please add japanbowl@jaswdc.org to your known senders list to prevent our emails being sent to spam.

We expect all of our volunteers to watch the training video and, schedules allowing, attend the in-person venue walkthrough.

Each year, that National Japan Bowl attracts the attention of a number of local and international media outlets looking to cover the competition. Some of our sponsors have also expressed interest in directly communicating with our participants and volunteers. Please indicate whether you would be interested in contact with any media outlets or sponsors that might come to the Japan Bowl.