Japan tells me to take an English test.

So, I had a meeting with the international coordinator (Maeda-sensei) for the Economics department at Kobe University ("Hi. I really like your university/country. Will you please take me back in a year or two?").

Basically, in principal, I can was the answer. One odd thing. Apparently part of the entrance exam I would have to take for post-grad economics is the TOEIC exam* (Test Of English for International Communication). Everyone does this, including the Japanese students. Apparently they've just never had a native English speaker as a student, so we spent about 45 minutes calling round various people to figure out if they would make me do this (Rather surprisingly for Japan, everyone admitted straight up that it was rather pointless to make me do it.). At one point Maeda-sensei even asked "You're Scottish right? Is there any way you can claim Scottish as your first language?".

I actually had a look at some of the test questions later in a book store... There were a few I didn't know...

*TOEIC holds a somewhat bizarrely revered position in Japanese society. Not Kimutaku/Ichiro-level reverence of course, but you hear people talking about fairly regularly (actually it would be more accurate to say "you hear people talking about it when they see a foreigner"), and the English book sections of bookstores are sorted by "TOEIC-level X" shelves...

I need JLPT 1 as well (Yay! fun! Not to mention another 500 Mister Donuts points :-S). Actually, that's not 100% true. I would need to SIT the JLPT 1 exam. Apparently they wouldn't care even if I got 0 as long as I attended the exam. Actually I was planning to taking it this December anyway...

Somewhat depressingly, JLPT 2, despite being a perfectly respectable level of Japanese is in practice a rather useless qualification... It's kinda 中途半端 as Yume would say...