The Essential License for Your Dream Diving Career in Japan – The 潜水士 (Senkuishi)

This is probably a bit of a rambling post, but bear with me.

Many people who dream of working in diving in Japan will have noticed that job listings at Japanese dive shops often include a perk along the lines of: "We'll guide you through Japan's national certification exam."

What Is the 潜水士?

That national exam is for the 潜水士 (Senkuishi) — Japan's official diver certification.

The content really isn't that difficult. The exam covers pretty much the same theory topics that instructor candidates tackle in their IE written exams — just in Japanese!

Japan's government has a rather inflexible rule: if you want to engage in any commercial diving activity, you need this license.

What that also means, in practice, is that once you pass the written exam and get the certificate, you can technically work professionally in water activities — snorkeling, scuba diving, you name it — even if you can't swim...

The official website has useful information such as the breakdown of question categories, where exams are offered, and test locations:

https://www.exam.or.jp/exmn/H_shikaku611.htm#

Generally speaking, larger regions hold the exam more frequently. The Kantō and Kansai areas, for example, offer it roughly six times a year. Other regions like Kyushu and Hokkaido have fewer sessions.

Okinawa — where many dive instructors are based — is a special case: because it falls under a special travelling examination (出張特別試験), the exam is only held once or twice a year, typically in November and January.

I won't go into the registration process in detail, since dive shops usually handle that for you — you just need to submit your documents.

How to Prepare for the 潜水士 Exam

Back to the exam itself.

If you read Japanese, studying should be fairly straightforward.

For someone like me who doesn't read Japanese at all, the material looked like an alien language at first. I could recognise individual kanji, but put them together and I had no idea what they meant.

I highly recommend this book:

Recommended study book for the 潜水士 exam

Buy on Amazon

I basically ground through that book cover to cover, then hammered past exam questions relentlessly.

https://bukubuku.biz/

This website has past exam papers with explanations at the very bottom of the page — finding it felt like striking gold.

I worked through everything with Google Translate by my side.

After a while, you start noticing that so many questions repeat from year to year.

One trick that made the exam a lot more manageable: memorise some katakana.

A huge amount of diving terminology in Japanese is just English words transliterated directly. For example, weight (配重) becomes ウエート (u-e-to). Once you pick up patterns like that, things click into place.

(Funnily enough, I figured out that ない means "not" or "without" — not because someone explained it to me or because I Googled it, but because I'd written so many past-paper answers that I noticed the pattern myself. Ha!)

Honestly, with one solid week of studying, the 潜水士 exam really isn't hard.

If you'd rather not buy the book (I didn't — there happened to be a copy at the shop), just go all-in on past exam papers. Drill every question until you can answer reflexively, and you'll be in great shape — because the questions really do repeat almost every year!

And let's be honest, having a Japanese national certification on your résumé sounds pretty impressive. Ha!!

Good luck to everyone sitting the 潜水士 exam!

Erica

想不用腳踏實地就能環遊世界的菜鳥潛水教練