Kangoshi Kokka Shiken

Questions are multiple choice, answered on a computer-marked mark-sense sheet. Many items ask you to select among combinations of correct statements, and some are calculations such as dose, drip rate or BMI. The exam is written in Japanese. Confirm the current structure and any format changes in the official announcement for your examination year.

The content is undergraduate-level but broad, so the usual failure mode is uneven coverage - strong in adult nursing, weak in maternal or psychiatric nursing - plus careless reading of combination items. Calculation slips and missing the one word that reverses a statement (for example 誤っているものを選べ) also cost marks. Practise reading stems precisely.

Those figures change and are published officially, so do not rely on second-hand numbers. Check the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare (厚生労働省) site for the current examination's question count, schedule and time allocation, then build your timed practice around those official figures rather than around rumours or old prep books.

Retake rules and any eligibility conditions are set officially, so verify them with the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare (厚生労働省) rather than assuming. Practically, treat a first attempt as diagnostic: keep your notes and error log, and if you sit again, rebuild weak domains from the mechanism level instead of re-reading the same summaries.

Start with the foundational sciences and basic nursing, because adult, gerontological, child and maternal nursing all lean on anatomy, physiology, pathology and pharmacology. Then move domain by domain, and only after that switch to integrated case questions and timed full-length practice. Keep an error log organised by domain so revision targets your weakest areas.

Fees and the pass standard are official figures that are announced for each examination and are not stated here. Check the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare (厚生労働省) announcements for the current fee, the pass standard and any scoring rules, and confirm the payment deadlines, which are easy to miss.

Eligibility is defined by the official regulations and depends on completing an approved nursing education or an equivalent route, so check the current requirements before you plan. If your qualification came from outside Japan, confirm the recognition process early, because documentation can take far longer than the study itself.

After each item, write down why the correct option is right and why each distractor is wrong, naming the mechanism. For calculation items, redo the sum without looking and check the units. Reviewing explanations this way builds transferable reasoning, which is what combination-style and case-based items reward.

The Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare (厚生労働省) publishes the examination announcements, including dates, application periods and results. Use that as your single source for logistics, and treat any figure you see on a study site - including this one - as something to verify there before you rely on it.