司法書士試験-仕事を辞めずに一発合格する方法
Yesterday, I read at a nearby café a book written by a young Japanese woman named Yayoi Kawashima (河島弥生), documenting her timeline of preparing for and passing the Japanese Judicial Scrivener Exam within a relatively short period of one year and eight months—while working full-time.
This exam, a national accreditation, is reputed to be very memory-intensive and extremely difficult to pass, normally requiring around 3,000 hours of study. If you can dedicate 15 hours of study per week, it’ll take you 200 weeks—almost four years—to pass the exam and be certified as a judicial scrivener in Japan. It is administered once a year and has a pass rate of around 5 percent.
This makes the case of Ms Kawashima a remarkable example of highly efficient exam preparation. As I’ve been interested in taking this exam for some time, I read her book with great interest and finished it in one sitting.
By the way, in case you’re wondering what a judicial scrivener does, they are authorized to perform a wide range of legal procedures, such as real estate registrations, company registrations, and inheritance-related asset transfers.
Since you need to be accredited to conduct these tasks, there is limited competition within the industry. Furthermore, the cost of setting up a judicial scrivener office is relatively little—all you need is a laptop, Internet connection and a printer—and you’re not even required to have a dedicated physical office, if you can set aside a room in your home to run the business and meet clients.
Due to the recent economic downturn in China triggered by the burst of the real estate bubble, numerous affluent Chinese entrepreneurs have been scrambling to protect their wealth by transferring their financial assets, setting up businesses, buying real estate, and even sending their children to study in prestigious schools in Japan.
As a result, there has been a growing demand for judicial and administrative scriveners who can speak Mandarin to serve a Chinese clientele. As someone who speaks Japanese, Chinese, and English fluently, becoming a judicial or administrative scrivener in Japan is definitely something I could consider as my second career after I retire from my current job in Singapore.
Returning to this book, Ms Kawashima has some interesting insights to share for exam preparation. Although in terms of the absolute duration, her preparation period of 20 months is much shorter than the average, the intensity of her study is definitely remarkable—she dedicated at least 20 hours per week to studying, meaning she spent pretty much her entire free time, foregoing all sorts of entertainment and relaxation.
Ms Kawashima’s level of dedication was such that she specifically chose an exam venue more than a hundred kilometers away from her home that was inside a hotel rather than a much closer venue on a college campus.
There, she reserved a room for the five days leading up to the exam so she could do her utmost to prepare and make sure to arrive at the exam center on time. Obviously, her efforts paid off, enabling her not only to pass the exam, but also to pass it with flying colors, ranking 13th out of the 13,372 participants.
As for me, I don’t consider myself to be particularly efficient when it comes to exam-taking. However, given my extensive experience of trials and errors in the past 15 years or so, I’ve learned to improve my preparation methods over the years.
The prospect of taking a major test like the Japanese Judicial Scrivener Exam sounds, while daunting, like an exciting challenge to me. I don’t know whether I’ll really end up taking this exam, but I’ll keep an open mind and eagerly face up to the challenge when the opportunity presents itself.
