Among nerd totems, knowledge of the Japanese language ranks in the upper strata—somewhere above authentic ninja swords and below custom NES mods. Japanese proficiency provides you with access to the origin of all things cool and, more importantly, the ability to lord it over your peers. You don’t need to wait for the translations; you know what Sailor Moon said in the original!

The problem with language-as-status-symbol, though, is that it’s hard to quantify. Sure, you can claim that you know so many hundred kanji, but those numbers are easy to pump up and easier to dissemble. Language has no hertz or gigaFLOPS, just an amorphous concept of “fluency.” So how can competitive geeks objectively declare that “my Japanese is bigger than yours”?

With the Japanese Language Proficiency Test. Created in 1984 by an offshoot of the Japanese Foreign Ministry, the JLPT was intended to give bilingual job-seekers a board-certified reference to put on their résumés—i.e., if you pass JLPT Level 2, your superiors at Shirakawa Semiconductor Concern consider you somewhat less likely to humiliate them with your clumsy foreign tongue.

From these utilitarian roots, the JLPT evolved into a benchmark against which aspiring otaku measure each other (and, not coincidentally, into a motivational tool for Japanese teachers). It was in this spirit that I traveled to Columbia University last week to take the Level 3 JLPT.¹

The JLPT is less a standardized test than a battle of wills. Designed by a country notoriously ambivalent about foreigners, the test employs misdirection, condescension, and tedium to discourage you from pursuing your Japanese studies further. The JLPT does not ask, “How well can you speak Japanese?” but rather “How bad do you want it?” Fail to realize this and the battle is surely lost.

On test day, I joined about 60 fellow Level 3 testees—mostly college students, about 60% male—at Columbia’s Hamilton Hall, where we were directed to a third-floor classroom. A plaque on the wall declared it the W. T. Chang Family Lecture Room, prompting the thought that perhaps all this time would have been better spent studying Mandarin.

We took our numerically assigned seats and waited. Some sipped their water, for “water in a clear bottle with a secure lid…stored under your seat, not on your desk” was permitted, according to the pre-test pamphlet we’d received. All other food and drink was contraband. Ditto for cell phones, “electronic devices and media,” “a watch that beeps,”² and “handwritten or printed materials.”

An overbearing teaching assistant read the official JLPT instructions while her assistant proctors, a Japanese underclassman and a mousy professor, distributed our test booklets and answer sheets. “Do not open your test booklets before the test begins!” the TA rasped. Thirty seconds later: “Check to make sure that your booklet is clearly printed and has all 11 pages.” How could we do this without opening our booklets? It must be a trick, I thought. So as the other testees wantonly flipped through their booklets—surely they would be disqualified!—I peeled back the very tip of the booklet’s back corner and bent over to look for an “11.”³

It was clear that this test wouldn’t suffer fools lightly, just as it was clear that we were all fools. The TA proceeded: “Correctly write your name and birthdate on the answer sheet in the spaces provided.” Write them correctly, check. But when was I born? Was it today? “Do not put today’s date in the space for your birthdate.” Got it. Thank you, incredibly patronizing JLPT instructions!

I joke now, but the insidious JLPT was breaking us down. If we couldn’t be trusted to remember who we were and when we were born, how could we master a foreign language? Cracks began to show in the testees. Jiggling knees, tapping pencils, teasing hair—this was a rattled bunch.

Then came W. T. Chang’s Revenge. Our stiff, wooden seats were outfitted with arm desks about the size of ping-pong paddles. Once the test began, the room filled with a chorus of fumbling papers and dropped booklets. It was impossible to balance all the test materials on the paddle at once. I can’t overstate how frustrating this was. We were being taunted. “You want it this bad? Really?”

The JLPT is administered in three parts. The second part, listening comprehension, is a deathblow of sorts. In this section, you listen to conversations in Japanese and then answer a question about what was discussed. That would be simple enough if the people on the tape conversed like normal human beings, but they don’t. Instead, they speak in the most circuitous manner possible, tossing in some random nonsense to throw you further off the scent.

Woman: Let’s have an office party a week from the day after Tuesday.

Guy 1: I can’t make it on the day that you just said. I have a dentist appointment, but maybe I can reschedule it, but on second thought, I can’t.

Guy 2: Sandwiches?

Guy 3: Perhaps it would be better to hold the party two days after the day following the 20th of the month.

Guy Who Sounds Kind of Similar to Guy 1 But You’re Not Sure: I think that would work, because the evening before that particular day is the morning of our big presentation.

OK, This Guy is Definitely Guy 1: No, that’s Thursday afternoon, at 9 a.m.

Woman: Then it’s settled.

Guy 3: Yes, agreed.

Guy 2: Sandwiches.

It seems they know you’re eavesdropping, they know your Japanese isn’t too sharp, and they’d prefer you didn’t discern their secret office-party plan. Burn about 20 of these to a CD and you have the JLPT listening section. This parade of cryptic misanthropes tramples any sense of welcome you might have felt from the Japanese people. An effective tactic.

Morale was low after the listening section, and conversation dwindled to a whisper. Partly because we felt beaten; partly because talking in the hall during breaks was “prohibited, and testees who violate this rule may have their results invalidated.” We picked up our shattered spirits, along with the booklets that had fallen off our goddamn desks again, and stumbled through grammar & reading.

When the test concluded, our proctor warned us that anyone who “distributed test content via the Internet or any other communication network will have their results invalidated.” Right. Whatever. They could have invalidated the bejesus out of us for all we cared. We just wanted to go home. Finally, mercifully, we did.

Despite the use of optical-scan answer sheets (those fill-in-the-bubble deals that get fed into a computer), the results take a ludicrous three months to tabulate—one final test of endurance. Perhaps, the thinking goes, if our wills were not broken by the actual test, a long silence will compel our interests to drift elsewhere. “Portuguese looks like fun, or maybe I’ll take up basket-weaving…”

Indeed, I’m sure by the time our results are grudgingly mailed in March, many of us won’t care anymore. We’ll be too busy studying for JLPT Level 2. For some reason, we want it that bad.