By itself mastering a language is not a competitive activity, and ultimately – in terms of practical application – does not require any proof of your proficiency as long you are able to use that language for communication purposes.
However, similarly to all other human endeavors, although at the end of the day everything depends on one’s actual skills and capacities regarding a given subject, the role of objectively and publicly recognizable yardsticks of one’s proficiency in this or that occupation can hardly be overstated.
How can one prove they are a doctor? – well, first and foremost they can do that by presenting their diploma awarded upon graduating from a relevant educational institution or any document proving them being part of a medical association with corresponding credentials.
Goes without saying that in addition to all those “testimonial accreditations”, they would also need to be able treat patients, but the former serve an important signatory function to differentiate doctors from non-doctors.
Obviously, same logic applies to Japanese language as well.
And in this sense, for better or worse, Japan is a country where formal accreditations play even more important and prominent role than they may have in other countries.
Special exams and qualifications exist for all sorts of things from activities what one would normally associate with those requiring some sort of formal recognition of one’s abilities or status (like lawyers, doctors, accountants) to ball-pen penmanship or Japanese castle history, or innumerable other areas.
In many countries, exams and tests are considered to be solely a domain of students, but in Japan many people keep learning about different things in their adult lives as well – whether as part of raising their professional level or as a hobby.
This is what makes studying Japanese so unique among studying other languages: unlike other languages you have tests designed not only exclusively for those who study them as foreign, but also those that are mainly intended for native speakers themselves to test their abilities in Japanese.
And the best thing is that fortunately those tests do not in theory exclude non-native speakers: in theory because since for the most part they are conducted only in Japan (especially, their highest levels) taking them is impossible unless one can come to Japan in person.
Most non-native Japanese speakers studying Japanese language take the Nihongo Nouryoku Shiken or Japanese Language Proficiency Test usually finishing their pursuit of formal credentials with its top level N1.
There are, of course, many other Japanese language tests, like the BJT or Business Japanese Test, but their public profile is not as high as that of JLPT, and they are even less known among ordinary Japanese people outside of Japanese language education industry.
Long story short, the two top credentials any Japanese language learner is able to acquire are the “Kanji Kentei level 1” and “Nihongo Kentei level 1”.
Kanji Kentei is centered around testing abilities to correctly write kanji characters, and being able to use them to read and compose texts written using them. The top level of the Kanji Kentei level 1 (known in Japanese as “Kanken Ikkyuu”) requires familiarity with approximately 6300 individual kanji characters, their readings, meanings, compound words using different combinations of such kanji, as well as many other things.
Though there are significant differences between them both in terms of format and content, the Nihongo Kentei is more similar to JLPT than the Kanji Kentei test.
However, what is common between the top levels of both the Kanji Kentei and Nihongo Kentei tests is their extraordinary difficulty even for native Japanese speakers, and even for those native Japanese speakers who have dedicated many years on preparation for such tests.
Since neither Kanken nor Nihongo Kentei exclude anyone from taking them based on whatever one’s native language may be, they can also be taken by what we may call “foreigners” or “gaikokujin” as well.
Of course, due to its exclusionary connotations in certain contexts this very term (“gaikokujin”) may be considered controversial if not problematic, so instead of “foreigner” in our case we can use a more language-specific expression of “non-native speaker” – which for the Kanji Kentei test would also imply that such person must not be from a country or a territory where kanji characters are used as part of the official language used therein (this applies to China, Taiwan, and to a lesser degree to Korea).
As of the time of making this video (which is April 2022), there are three known non-native Japanese speakers and non-native kanji learners who throughout the history of its existence have managed to pass the Kanji Kentei level 1 test – they are Bret Meyer from the US (he passed the test in 2012), John Brobst also from the US (passed the test in 2013), and Evgeny Uskov (that is yours truly from the Russian Federation who passed the test in 2021).
As for the Nihongo Kentei level 1, the only non-native Japanese speaker of whom there is objectively verifiable information that he passed the test is Evgeny Uskov (I managed to do it in 2020).
So, if you want to boost your credential profile for Japanese language to the limit aim for Kanji Kentei level 1 and Nihongo Kentei level 1.