Primary-source writing on sign language, disability rights and welfare, and universal design — from the perspective of the education and welfare field.
Where do Japan’s sign language interpreters come from? Twenty-one years of prefecture-level exam results. Hyogo leads with 339 cumulative passes and Tokyo is third — but per 100,000 residents Kochi comes first and the order almost entirely inverts. Overlaid on the map of nationally certified interpreters, the two barely correlate at all (0.11).
→ Read more2,059 people sat the exam; 171 passed — about one in twelve. In the 25 years since it began in 2001, no other year has had a single-digit pass rate (the previous low was 11.77% in FY2014). The same year drew the largest field on record and reached every prefecture for the first time. People assume no national statistics exist for this exam; they are published every year, and I confirmed all 25 of them in the official documents.
→ Read moreReaction speed does not train, but aiming is a motor task and it does. Fitts’s law, the speed–accuracy tradeoff, the two walls of mouse sensitivity, why 30 minutes a day gets 90% of the learning — and an honest account of the fact that no controlled study shows transfer to a real game.
→ Read moreI split my reaction time test into seven modes. What the gap between simple and choice reaction time tells you, why a task that measures not pressing is a different thing, how backward masking makes the same exposure much harder, and why dynamic visual acuity is a separate ability from static acuity.
→ Read more¥1.06 million appears nowhere in Japanese law; the provisions say ¥88,000 a month. Abolition is settled but the date was delegated to a Cabinet Order, while the company-size requirement has dates written in and runs to October 2035.
→ Read moreThe increase planned for August 2025 was shelved, but it did not end there. A redrawn version took effect on 1 August 2026, with a new annual ceiling running August to July and the multiple-occurrence figures held at their existing level.
→ Read moreReading the 72nd contest’s entry rules and Q&A, more is unspecified than specified. No rule on paper size or grid, none on where the title and name go, nothing about indenting. Where handwriting is difficult, a scribe or word processor is accepted with a stated reason.
→ Read moreThe American bullfrog is a designated invasive alien species in Japan. Catching one is not restricted, and neither is releasing it on the spot. Carrying it home alive counts as transport and breaches the ban on keeping. Tadpoles and eggs are treated the same.
→ Read moreSince 1 June 2023, red swamp crayfish and red-eared sliders have been conditionally designated invasive alien species. Schools may still keep them without a permit, but a school counts as keeping them “as a business”. Releasing them is banned, and sending them home with pupils counts as distribution.
→ Read moreRiding side by side is prohibited by Article 19 of Japan’s Road Traffic Act. The only exception is a road carrying a sign that is almost never installed. Since April 2026 it carries a ¥3,000 on-the-spot fine — but only from age 16, while 15-to-19-year-olds are the largest group injured on bicycles.
→ Read moreNo nationwide law in Japan bans earphones on a bicycle. What each prefecture prohibits is a state of hearing, not a device — and since April 2026 it carries a ¥5,000 on-the-spot fine. Earplugs, bone conduction, hearing aids and cochlear implants, read from primary sources.
→ Read moreA 2025 national survey of 1,427 employed interpreters in Japan. Of the 854 employed by municipalities, only 83 hold a permanent post. Average annual pay is ¥2,606,000 and the average age is 56.5 — yet 76.9% hold prefectural certification.
→ Read moreKillua's Godspeed in HUNTER×HUNTER has two modes. Whirlwind bypasses both the brain and the spinal cord; Speed of Lightning raises the speed of the movement itself. Reading the manga's own explanations against how a human body actually works.
→ Read moreThere is no such thing as a reflex nerve. Raw reaction speed did not change after two years of sports practice, elite athletes are not faster but can wait longer, and esports players show no significant advantage in reaction time.
→ Read moreYou install a picture-card app and the child cannot press it: the hand drops before reaching the screen, presses land on the wrong card, or register several times over. Koe Palette connects to MIDI devices, so a music pad or the digital piano in the school music room works as a set of AAC buttons. Through to scanning with a single switch, worked through from the least effort.
→ Read moreJapan’s Sign Language Interpreting Skills Certification Examination rests on a Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare ordinance. The cumulative pass rate is 13.7% and the most recent sitting 11.2%, but the year-to-year range runs from 2.1% to 13.3%. Forty percent of those who pass are in their fifties.
→ Read moreI compared the 191 detailed keywords in the official GenAI Passport syllabus (4th edition) against a 2,651-term IT Passport glossary, one by one. Only 42 overlapped — 22%. The distribution is uneven: 31% in Chapters 1 and 4, 11% in Chapter 2, and ChatGPT, Transformer and GAN appear nowhere on the IT Passport side.
→ Read moreThe last exam day under CBT is December 27, 2026; delivery is suspended from the 28th and the restart is undecided. From September, booking can only select dates up to the 27th. Test-centre closing dates, vouchers, and the FY2027 reform with its transitional measures — all from IPA’s own material.
→ Read moreThe pass mark for Japan’s National Unified Examination for Sign Language Interpreters is not officially published — and neither is the national pass rate. What the FY2026 Examination Handbook does confirm, how to treat the “70% written, 75% practical” figure, and a countdown with a preparation checklist.
→ Read moreOn July 31, 2026, Japan's Eiken association postponed its new entry-level Grades 6 and 7, planned for the third 2026 session — because foreign-language education for the next national curriculum is still being deliberated. What the grades were, what stays the same for now, and why tests move in lockstep with the curriculum.
→ Read moreWhat happens in the “sōgō” slot on a Japanese timetable? The four-phase inquiry cycle, and the word-order inversion that separates elementary/junior-high “integrated study” from high-school “integrated inquiry” — plus the subject-based inquiry courses and what the next revision may change, from MEXT primary sources.
→ Read moreJapan's Courses of Study are public documents anyone can read — once you have a map and the right glasses. The preamble–general-provisions–subjects structure, the official text vs. the explanatory guides, and how the three pillars of competencies unlock every subject's goals, based solely on MEXT primary sources.
→ Read moreJapanese answers negative questions by agreeing with the questioner’s assumption (truth-based); English yes/no follows the polarity of the answer itself. Linguistic typology, a rare manga scene that tackles this head-on, and the interpreter’s technique: open the question into the affirmative, answer with the proposition.
→ Read moreWhy interpreter training in Japan teaches converting a negative confirming question to the affirmative — sorted out through Japanese grammar (negative questions vs. true double negatives) and sign-language linguistics (lexical negation, non-manual markers, mouth gestures), plus how to interpret real double negatives.
→ Read moreFollowing one of the disability movement's most famous slogans: from the Black civil rights movement, through the U.S. Section 504 sit-in and the ADA, Deaf President Now, and the UN CRPD, to Japan's disability-discrimination and sign-language laws.
→ Read moreA primary-source picture of the U.S. system: diverse modalities (ASL, English-based signing, oral and cued-speech, deaf interpreters), RID/NIC credentials, the ADA and IDEA duties, VRS/VRI, and campus access.
→ Read moreA nationwide survey of what interpreters personally receive for a two-hour assignment. The highest is Misawa (Aomori) at ¥10,000. The institutional design shared by the municipalities at the top, shown as a ranking.
→ Read moreWe checked, one municipality at a time, how much a sign-language interpreter is paid for a two-hour assignment across Japan — using each local government's own rules. A confirmed amount was public for only 13%.
→ Read moreSet passwords, merge, and split PDFs entirely in your browser — nothing is uploaded, so your files never leave your device. No sign-up.
→ Read moreA walkthrough of Oekaki Studio: focus lines, layers, transparent PNG and SVG export — a free drawing app that runs in the browser, with no sign-up.
→ Read moreA clock that shows at a glance how many minutes are left — how to use the free Mitoshi Clock to help children see the flow of a lesson.
→ Read moreThe three sentence types in Japanese — simple, compound, and complex — sorted out with examples, and why mastering complex sentences matters in deaf education, in light of the “nine-year-old wall” and Japanese Sign Language.
→ Read moreA data-driven look at five years (2021–2025) of the written paper: the surge in social-work questions, the shift toward conceptual and applied items, and the growing abstraction of the reading passages that made 2025 harder.
→ Read moreThe three places children get stuck in the column method for long division — divide, multiply, subtract, bring down — and how to match the teaching to where each child stumbles.
→ Read moreA rundown of the 2027 reform of the Information Technology Engineers Examination — the reorganization into 8 categories and the newly created Data Management exam, with sources from IPA.
→ Read moreWhat Japan's National Unified Examination for Sign-Language Interpreters actually is — pass rates, the written and practical papers, and how to study, including the impact of the 2025 Sign Language Policy Promotion Act.
→ Read moreAn original analysis of the written (basic-knowledge) section: the TOP 10 most-tested themes — the Basic Act for Persons with Disabilities, social work, honorific language and more — and the balance of questions by category.
→ Read moreA four-year analysis (2021–2024) of the written exam: the 7 staple themes tested every year, 28 near-staples, and 106 new-trend terms that never appeared a decade earlier — laid out to sharpen study priorities.
→ Read moreAn analysis of the FY2026 public sample questions for the IT Passport exam — generative AI and prompt engineering appear as tested topics for the first time.
→ Read moreWays to decide seating, plus a free seating-chart tool that lays out rows, U-shape, and horseshoe arrangements in seconds.
→ Read moreA clear guide to AAC: its core idea, the four categories from unaided to high-tech, three steps to start in the classroom, and the free AAC app Koe Palette — drawn from hands-on experience at a school for children with disabilities.
→ Read moreA ranking of the security-domain terms tested most often on the IT Passport exam, as a checklist — each term with its standard English name and the Japanese in parentheses.
→ Read moreSolution patterns for the 23 calculation topics on the IT Passport exam — from binary numbers and availability rates to expected value, worked through step by step.
→ Read moreTwenty-nine past IT Passport exams analyzed by the data — the balance across the Strategy, Management, and Technology fields, and the terms that come up most often.
→ Read moreThe new terms added in IT Passport Syllabus Ver.6.5 — generative AI, zero trust, prompt engineering and more — what changed from older versions, and how to study efficiently.
→ Read moreTen ways to use a roulette / gacha random-picker in class — for calling on students, making groups, warming up, and more.
→ Read moreThe places children get stuck when subtracting with borrowing in the column method, and an 8-step small-steps approach to teaching it clearly.
→ Read moreHow a simple scoreboard makes team and group activities more exciting, with practical ways to use the free tool in class.
→ Read moreHow to help children understand that people see colors differently, and what universal design means — using the free “World of Color” tool.
→ Read morePractical ways to use a free classroom timer — for transitions, focus time, and keeping activities on track.
→ Read moreEiken® is a registered trademark of the Eiken Foundation of Japan. This site is not endorsed by the Eiken Foundation of Japan.