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Trish Victoria was declared the 1st International winner of the NHK Nodo Jiman during the NHK TV airing on July 18. “I accidentally entered one of Japan’s longest and largest singing competitions (over 70 yrs!),” said Victoria. It turned out that the contest was the NHK Nodo Jiman which was expanded to an international virtual edition for 2021. A week later, I got called in by NHK and they asked to feature my song and then the rest is history!” shared Victoria with. “I don’t speak Japanese and I only really knew one Japanese song to sing and so I submitted my song and then forgot about it. She readily recorded Snow Flower / Yuki no Hana, with her background showing a room with an unmade bed and luggage that hasn’t been unpacked, as her contest entry.
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Trish Victoria had just come home to the Philippines after graduating from Georgetown and was feeling sad while quarantining as a Covid-19 pandemic protocol when she found a Facebook advertisement calling for a cover of a Japanese song. I thought people wouldn’t want to work with the girl who’s operating in a flipped timezone from the other side of the world,” Victoria wrote in her graduation post. In a class of 67, I was the farthest out with a 13hr time difference and it scared me. “Instead of meeting new friends, all my interactions were on zoom and the closest thing I had to a conversation was on zoom chat or groupme. She attended classes from 1 to 8 in the morning during typhoon season in the Philippines, attending class despite a power outage and her computer battery quickly draining while writing an essay. Her vision of walking around the Georgetown University campus in the United States was replaced by studying from home. Trish Victoria was all set for her master’s studies in the United States when the Covid-19 pandemic struck in 2020. Prior to her studies in Georgetown, Victoria had also graduated with honors from the Science, Technology and Medicine Summer Program offered for the first time by Stanford Anesthesia Summer Institute (SASI) at Stanford University, the lone Filipino in the 30-member class of 2017. Patricia Margaret Victoria, a McDonough Scholar and Cohort Chair at the McDonough School of Business in Georgetown University Class of 2021, has been focused on building up her academic credentials after graduating with a Psychology degree from De La Salle University Manila.
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Georgetown University scholar Trish Victoria became the singing champion of the 2021 NHK Nodo Jiman in Japan in a situation she refers to as “accidental”. Trish Victoria’s winning the 2021 NHK Nodo Jiman is a story of Filipino talent shining through amidst the Covid-19 pandemic.