Matsuri at UC San Diego was founded in 2009 by the Nikkei Student Union and Japanese Student Association at UC San Diego.
Year after year, a new group of student volunteers run the entire event. Our planning process takes about a year from team selection to the days leading up the events.
Different committees within our team take on a variety of different tasks, from budgeting, recipe planning, to cold emailing and calling potential partners.
The largest night market at UC San Diego.
Right in the center of campus, Matsuri had traditionally been at UC San Diego’s Library Walk, the center of activities, classes, and events attracting passers-by as the smell of the foods spread throughout.
We take the most of the entire length of Library Walk as Matsuri is one of the largest events and the largest night market hosted at UC San Diego.
Homemade food, engaging games, captivating performances.
Our food committee branches out to into an even larger team consisting of roughly 15-20 people (depends on foods for each year), who help plan and execute the preparation and cooking of foods each and every year. Most of our games are carefully hand-picked from traditional Matsuri games, while some are completely hand-crafted from scratch. Our performances are local San Diego performers or UCSD performance clubs.
Our sponsors make Matsuri possible.
We thank you each and every sponsor for making Matsuri possible. Our sponsors provide food ingredients, materials, and much more which all go into assisting our team build our event bigger and allow for a more enjoyable experience.
All in all, we build community.
We are incredibly proud of all the work that has been done, year after year we continuously grow as a place of opportunity, growth, and expression of culture.