Yahoo! Internet Kentei

» see cert.yahoo.co.jp as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Yahoo! JAPAN opened an examination hall on 24 May 2004. You paid for a subject and sat the test in a browser window at your own desk. Internet Skill Assessment cost 500 yen. Internet Communication Adviser and Shopping and Auction Adviser were 3,000 yen each. Passing got you a certificate card in the post, plus an icon.

The icon looks strange from here and made perfect sense at the time. It appeared beside your identity in Yahoo! Auctions, and in two other corners of the portal where strangers had to decide about you, and it meant a company had tested you and was willing to say so next to your name. This was 2004, years before any platform handed out a verified check mark, and Yahoo! JAPAN had already worked out that what people wanted from a marketplace was a way to look trustworthy in it. Yahoo charged three thousand yen for that and made you answer questions first.

Japan takes the kentei format seriously in a way that does not really translate. A kentei is a graded proficiency test, there are thousands of them, and sitting one for fun is a normal adult hobby rather than a professional obligation. Yahoo was not inventing a category here. It was putting an existing national pastime behind a web form and letting you do it without going to a hall on a Sunday morning.

~ the dossier ~

~ from internet literacy to hawaii ~

The roster drifted, and the drift is the most honest record of what people actually wanted. The 2004 lineup was internet competence. By 2006 there was an intellectual-property exam endorsed by an outside education association. By the time the final list was posted in 2011 the sixteen surviving titles covered typing, digital cameras, shogi grading, food education, French wine mastery, golf, Hawaii, and a rakugo appreciation test with the word for connoisseur set in quotation marks.

There was a second counter too, which is easy to miss. Alongside its own exams Yahoo ran a booking desk for other organizations' real-world ones, operated through an outside company, carrying the logos of the national kanji and English proficiency bodies. You could not sit those in a browser. Yahoo was simply the place where you signed up for them, and that half of the business was always somebody else's credential.

~ the numbers that belonged to the other service ~

In September 2006 a free corner opened inside the site where anybody could write their own quiz for other people to take. That corner, Minna no Kentei, is the one that produced the figures everybody quotes: ten million exam-takers by the summer of 2007, and thirty-two million of them against a hundred and sixty thousand quizzes by April 2008. None of those numbers belong to the paid exams, and no usage figure for the paid exams was ever published anywhere.

So the free amateur thing growing inside the commercial thing got enormous, and the commercial thing it was growing inside closed first. Minna no Kentei lasted until 30 June 2013 on the same domain.

~ a year of certificates ~

The service's own staff blog carried the closure notice at 16:49 on 3 August 2011 and laid out a schedule with eight dates on it. Course enrollment closed at eleven at night on 31 August. The certification icons came out of Yahoo! Photos on 1 September and out of Auctions on the twenty-eighth, so the badge vanished from the places that gave it meaning before the exams had even stopped. Sign-ups closed at 23:59 on 29 September. The last paper was sat on 30 September 2011, and the service ended at eight that evening.

Then came the slow part. Your examination history stopped displaying on Christmas Day 2011. Your online certificate kept rendering until 30 September 2012, a year to the day after the body that issued it had gone, and the notice never explained why that particular interval had been chosen. The domain itself began returning errors in October 2013, and today it has no DNS entry.

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