I never want to regret not trying something. It’s better to try and fail.

Hayao Miyazaki

I had a job test yesterday. Not an interview, an aptitude test, at a Japanese company. I had heard of these kind of aptitude tests that Japanese university and job applicants are put through, but I wasn’t expecting to have to sit one myself.

The job is for a position on the localization team for a manga company. They handle seemingly everything in a manga’s timeline, one of which is translation and localisation. When I saw the opening, my eyes lit up. I had considered getting into translation, but I thought it might be a pipe dream. Being paid to read stories in Japanese and translate them into English? Sign me up. Of course, this is localisation, so likely the work has already been machine translated and so the responsibility of this role would be to make the English spat out by the machine more natural, more flowing. But guess what? I also like writing! So it sounded like a great opportunity.

I need to get out of English teaching as there isn’t a future in it for me. It’s just a temporary gig to pay the bills while I study Japanese for a new career.

So I sent off an application and received an invite to an “aptitude test”. Since it was localization, I assumed I’d be given a sample piece to localise, and perhaps another sample to translate from Japanese into English too. Then I’d explain my reasoning and such. Something like that, perhaps you’re thinking the same.

Nope. Nothing like the sort. I joined the Zoom and saw a Japanese lady whose name I recognised from the invitation email. A second Japanese person who did not switch on their camera. Then 2 Latinos, a man and a woman, of some kind (just going by the names). We didn’t really talk, we simply listened to the lady explain what was going to happen. She gave us a link to a website where we were instructed to sign up and prepare for the test.

At this point I realised this wasn’t any kind of interview at all; it was purely an online test session. And the test itself? Not translation. Not localisation. No manga of any kind.

The test was a Japanese SPI-test. A kind of standardized aptitude test used by many companies to assess general reading comprehension, mathematical and logical ability. And being entirely in Japanese, it was hard. Like, beyond N1-level hard. I have been preparing for the N1 JLPT exam a lot lately, so I felt like I was at least quite warmed up for it, but I had never encountered this kind of exam before and had to control my face to not let slip how in the deep I felt.

Every question had a time limit, usually a minute or not much longer. The questions were mostly logic puzzles. Quite difficult ones too. I felt like to answer confidently, I would need probably 5 minutes for each one. But I didn’t have 5 minutes, I had 1 minute to read and answer, in Japanese. So no deep thinking, I was mostly going by feeling and vibes.

I didn’t record the interview so I can’t replicate the questions here. Imagine a question where it shows a diagram of 8 unlabelled people sitting around a table, and the question reads “A is sitting opposite B. C and D are sitting next to each other. There are 2 people between F and G etc. How is sitting next to E?”. Something like that.

Here’s a real example if you want to try. Seems like these questions would be good Japanese practice if you have passed N1 and are looking to refine your skills.

Anyway, I answered all of them, maybe only 30% of them confidently. After that, there was a personality quiz of about 108 questions. Again all in Japanese. They say there are no wrong answers to a personality quiz, but that’s obviously false because otherwise they wouldn’t give you the quiz. If you answer “I work well in a team environment” with “Definitely not”, you’re probably not going to get hired, right? So it’s still a test.

After that, we were instructed to simply leave the call quietly. So I did, giving something of an awkward bow to the camera as I did so to show some kind of courtesy.

Needless to say, I felt no confidence after that episode. It was a longshot, so I didn’t dwell on it much. I packed up my books and went to a café to study. To my surprise, I received an email inviting me to an interview! Since it is Golden Week now, the earliest I could book was the following week.

So perhaps there is some hope. I will prepare as best I can for the interview. I usually feel confident interviews, due to my affable and professional nature. The British accent does a lot of heavy-lifting too.

You never know, maybe Casian will be a manga localizer in a couple months from now. Wouldn’t that be great? I hope so, sounds like fun. I’d like to try it to see if it fits me well.