The Japanese Language Proficiency  Examination

On December 7, 1987, I took level one of the Nihongo Noryoku Shiken, the Japanese Language Proficiency Examination in Tokyo, Japan. Just writing that makes my blood pressure and heart rate rise; twenty years after the fact, I can still feel the adrenalin racing through my veins just thinking about it.

Although I had lived in Japan for four years and spent the past ten years studying Japanese, two years of which I had devoted exclusively to the Noryoku Shiken, on the morning of the seventh I still felt completely unprepared.

My apartment was not heated, so when I woke up and saw that it had snowed overnight, all I wanted to do was burrow back into my futon. My boyfriend, (now my husband) would not allow me to do this. ‘Come on, you’ve spent the past three years studying for it,’ he reminded me. I burrowed down deeper. ‘Your teacher will be disappointed.’ I put the pillow over my head. ‘You paid for it, for God’s sake. Six thousand yen. Non-refundable.’ That did it. I groaned and I whined and I gnashed my teeth, but I extracted myself from my futon and got dressed.

I went over the list of all the items I would need:  foreigner’s card, number 2 pencils, pencil sharpener, erasers, proof of registration and registration payment slip. Then I added to this all the items I felt I would need:  electronic Chinese character dictionary (yes, I know it’s Japanese, but the characters come from China and even in Japanese they are known as kanji, or ‘Chinese characters’), hard candy (for energy), tissues (I had a cold), and my three workbooks. The workbooks were much battered and scrawled in, the once-sharp edges and paper covers worn to a soft, cloth-like texture, and by this point they obviously weren’t going to do me any good. But they had become almost an integral part of me: they had accompanied me practically everywhere for the past two years. 

I would have eaten breakfast, but I could not:  my mouth was too dry.

On the train, I chatted with a well-groomed middle-aged woman from Ecuador who spoke perfect English. ‘What are you studying for?’ she wanted to know. I welcomed the diversion, so I told her. ‘My, my. Good for you. And just imagine! You are taking this test on Pearl Harbor Day!’  I looked at her in dismay. Somehow this interesting coincidence had escaped my notice. I cannot say that I found it cheering.

I hate tests. Tests make me feel as though the sum total of my worth is being spread all over a square piece of paper for all the world to tsk tsk over. Ironically, I don’t always do so badly on them. I have only out-and-out failed one test in all my life (chemistry, and in my own defence, so did one-third of the class), and I have always enjoyed learning and studying. I just hate, despise, loathe tests. And this one, with all its different components, its tricky language and trip-you-up phrasing, promised to be a particularly nasty one.

Looking back on it, I am amazed that I decided to go for it in the first place. Two of my fellow Japanese language school students had taken level one of the test; one had passed and one had failed. The one who had failed was preparing to take it again, and I was impressed with the amount of work she was putting in and the progress she was making, particularly in reading. Perhaps if I simply prepared for the test I too might make good progress with my reading. I mentioned this rather casually to my Japanese teacher one day and she responded enthusiastically. Of course I could do it!  Suddenly I found that she had scheduled me for two classes a week instead of the usual one. The next thing I knew, she had ordered me a textbook. Then, I acquired a set of tapes, then two more textbooks, then my first workbook.  After such a significant financial commitment, I suppose I had to go through with it.

The test was held in Aoyama Gakuin, a private women’s college. The test is given at four levels, the lowest being level four and the highest being level one. Level four is silly; it is for people who have put in only a few months of study and want to waste their hard-earned cash. Level three is harder, but it still doesn’t offer much of a challenge and won’t get you anywhere. Level two is when it starts getting tough, but people who’ve passed level one are considered to be ready for Japanese universities. Five minutes before I arrived in Aoyama, I had begun to doubt that I could hack level four.

When I got off the train, it was easy to find where the test was being held: there were a number of obvious foreigners – and even more not-so-obvious ones – all travelling in the same direction. The obvious foreigners all looked pretty much like me:  rather European and out of place. The not-so-obvious ones were Asian, and many of them could easily have passed for Japanese. Until you heard them speak.

‘Level three and four are over here!’ announced a man holding a bullhorn, for the benefit of those of us who had not spotted the 4-foot square signs with Level 4 and Level 3 written on them. He said it in both Japanese and English just to be on the safe side. ‘Yoo-hoo!  We’re over here,’ an American girl reminded me, as I walked past the rooms for level 3 and 4. I gave her a watery smile. Wish I were too.   

The level two and one rooms were the furthest away from the entrance. It was interesting but not surprising to note that the crowd was 85% Asian shortly after we passed the level three room. After we passed the level two room, the crowd was 99% Asian, and a few of the people were giving me looks and pointing back to the rooms we had just passed. Watashi mo ikkyuu yo I muttered, brandishing my registration form at them. A few people tried to tell me in English that I was going the wrong way, so I just repeated myself ‘Level one! I’m level one too!’ After that, my fellow test-takers, 99% of whom seemed to be Chinese, roundly ignored me.

I ought to explain that I owe much of my fluency in Japanese to Chinese people. When I studied art and literature at Oita University in Southern Japan, my Japanese level was so low that quite understandably few Japanese people wanted to talk with me. Once in a while I might manage a short exchange with a fellow literature student, but conversation with me was undoubtedly hard work: I could not say very much, and I could not say it well. The Chinese students, however, would always speak Japanese with me. They had virtually no English and I don’t know a word of Chinese, so Japanese was the only language we could use to communicate with one another. And although I know that we often ended up trading mistakes, I never felt that they were smirking at my dopey gaffes. They, in turn, knew that I would never patronize them for their choppy Japanese pronunciation. Years later, when I moved up north, I studied Japanese with Chinese students, and once again, Japanese was our lingua franca. Even if we ended up having relatively simple conversations about trifling topics, at least we were speaking Japanese.

In the level one room, however, no one knew that I was Mary, the Japanese- speaking Person. If they thought about me at all, they probably thought that I was The Stupid Foreigner who Went the Wrong Way.

There were over a hundred people in the level one room. One was a man from New Jersey who claimed he wasn’t nervous. Two were men who looked to be from India. The rest were Chinese, and 99% of them looked every bit as miserable as I felt.

The only Chinese person I spoke to before the test was the girl who was sitting in front of me. She asked me if I could speak Japanese Duh!  She then asked me very politely if she could borrow an eraser as she had forgotten hers. ‘How long have you lived in Japan?’ I asked her. Her answer shocked me:  Six months.  The poor woman was working as a waitress in a restaurant all day and studying Japanese in the evenings after a full-time shift. I’d been studying Japanese for ten years and I was still nervous about taking the test!

Although the structure of the test may have changed, when I took it the Nihongo Noryoku Shiken was divided into three sections:  vocabulary, reading comprehension and grammar, and listening comprehension. Written Japanese and Chinese are so similar that the reading comprehension and vocabulary are far easier for Chinese people than they are for non-Chinese. Grammar, however, is a different kettle of fish, and listening comprehension is tougher still for native speakers of Chinese – probably just as hard as it is for native speakers of European languages. 

The test was distributed by scary-looking people with bullhorns and no-nonsense manners, and we were all given minute instructions about precisely how to fill in the little spaces with our pencils, which had to be frequently resharpened.

When the test began, you could have cut the air in the room, it was that thick with fear. I don’t think my heart rate went under 110 beats per minute even once, and the test started at 10 in the morning and finished at around 4 in the afternoon with a 2-hour break for lunch. I’ll bet I burnt off about 10,000 calories just sitting there.

I remember very little about the test itself, as it all went by in a haze of nerves and misery. There was a graph with numbers on it which immediately sent my mind into a frenzy of panic which had nothing to do with Japanese:  Oh no!  Math!  I also remember pictures of fish with corresponding descriptions that you had to match with the right fish:  A blunt snout, a large, fringed dorsal fin. . . I furiously filled in blanks and fought the urge to hyperventilate.

When the lunch break was announced, I turned to the woman in front of me. ‘How are you finding it?’ I asked her. She smiled resignedly. ‘I am doomed. I have no chance of passing this test. I will have to go back to China.’  I genuinely felt for her, and I felt ashamed at how easy it all was for me. Not the language part – that was surely as hellish for me as it was for her. After all, she was Chinese and she already knew plenty more than the 2,000 characters you needed to take this test. But I came from a wealthy country; I had a college degree and thus had skills I could sell in Japan – teaching English, rewriting, etc. All this woman had was a one-year visa and the chance to study and work in Japan – but only if she managed to pass this test.

During the lunch break, I was again roundly ignored by almost all of my fellow test takers. The man from New Jersey seemed to take it all in stride. He was chewing gum and had an almost provokingly nonchalant manner. He thought he’d sussed the test, no problem. We then did what foreigners often do in Japan:  we sized each other up and tried to gauge who had the highest level of skill. What had he gotten for number sixteen, the thing about the Industrial Revolution? What had I put as the second kanji for chosakuka, writer?  I think we came to the conclusion that we were fairly evenly matched, but I certainly envied the fellow his blasé attitude.

Listening comprehension was left to the very end of the test. Again, I cannot remember much about this, but I will never forget that right in the middle of several questions, you had to turn the page. No big deal, right? But oddly enough, even though the tape recorder was playing at top volume, with over a hundred people turning their pages, all at slightly different times, it was very easy to miss the next few words of the question. And each item was only played twice. After two or three such experiences, it was funny to see how carefully everyone turned their pages.

‘TURN IN YOUR TEST PAPERS!’  the man with the bullhorn cried as soon as the finishing time had been announced. All of us jumped to attention as, seemingly from thin air, half a dozen assistants suddenly appeared in the aisles to collect our tests. We were all asked to have our identification cards at the ready. The assistants looked from our cards to our faces and asked us for our names, as they had done at designated times throughout the day. They hardly looked at me and the fellow from New Jersey, but paid careful attention to the Chinese.

As we left the room, all of us – Chinese, Indians, man from New Jersey and I – were suddenly mates. Wah, that was ridiculous!  Yeah -- you’d think they could have worked out a way to put the page breaks AFTER the questions!  Two women from Shanghai wanted to know where I had studied Japanese and for how long. A thin fellow from Wuhan told me that a friend of his had studied in Oita too. A man from Beijing agreed with us that the questions were not hard, but the page-turning was nonsense. Wah! he said, obviously impressed, you speak Japanese! I looked at you, thought ‘Hey, you are in WRONG classroom!’  Jeez, he must have thought I was pretty weird, sitting there and going through all of that merely because I was too embarrassed to admit I was in the wrong room.

We milled out of the Aoyama-Gakuin, a crowd several hundred strong, it seemed, all talking a mile a minute.  What about question, two ladies talking – one lady says ‘Do you want to come to party at my house on Saturday?’ and second lady says no, I am too busy that day, cannot come. Then she says ‘But wait – perhaps –’ and then tape finishes! What do you put for that one – she go to party or she not go to party? I could not decide!  We had no end of things to say to one another.

The station was on the other side of the street and we all jay-walked, every single one of us. A policeman could have arrested the lot of us and made a fortune, cars could have mown us down – we hardly cared. We were all high on post-Nihongo Noryoku Shiken. I felt euphoric.

Three and a half months later I felt even more euphoric when I got a letter informing me that I had passed.