🐱 Japan has a certification exam about cats. The cats do not take it. The humans do.

Roughly 40,000 people have sat it since 2017. Applications for the tenth edition opened on International Cat Day and close on a date picked because the number sounds like a meow. The official rules also confirm that if your cat wanders into the webcam frame halfway through, that is not cheating.

Three levels, 100 questions each

The Neko Kentei, literally "cat certification," is run by a committee of three. Nippan Segmo, a Tokyo company that operates a portal for private certification exams, handles the logistics. Live Publishing issues the study guides. And Jimbocho Nyankodo, a bookshop at the Jimbocho crossing in Tokyo that stocks around 2,000 cat books and very little else, takes the special production credit.

Beginner, intermediate and advanced. Each level is 100 multiple-choice questions with four options apiece.

The organisers released one sample question from the beginner level. Which of these is genuinely dangerous for a cat to eat: potato, daikon radish, onion, or carrot?

Neko Kentei sample question graphic asking which food is dangerous for cats, showing a grey cat surrounded by illustrations of potato, daikon radish, onion and carrot

Source: Nippan Segmo press release

Onion. According to the announcement, a compound in onions destroys feline red blood cells and causes hemolytic anemia. Keep it entirely out of reach, the answer key adds.

Sitting the beginner level costs 4,950 yen, about $31. Intermediate is 6,200 yen (about $39), advanced 7,500 yen (about $47). Take all three in a single day and it comes to 15,900 yen, right around $100. The official guidebooks run 1,540 to 1,870 yen, roughly $10 to $12, and one of the three is devoted entirely to cats, law and money.

The calendar is a running joke

Applications opened on August 8, 2026, which is International Cat Day, created by the International Fund for Animal Welfare in 2002 and looked after since 2020 by the British charity International Cat Care.

They close on February 24, 2027. Japan's own Cat Day is February 22, because two-two-two reads as ni-ni-ni, close enough to nyan nyan nyan, the Japanese for meow. The deadline is Cat Day plus two more days, and the organisers write that trailing "two" as nyan as well.

The exam itself lands on Monday, March 22, 2027, a public holiday in Japan. Candidates can take it at venues in Sapporo, Tokyo, Nagoya, Osaka and Fukuoka, or online from home on a laptop, tablet or phone. As of August 2026 the window is open.

Your cat may attend

The online version is camera-proctored. The system films candidates throughout, and the rules state plainly that sitting the test alongside your cat is not a violation.

The study material is asleep on the desk.

Forty thousand people, and where the money goes

Of the roughly 40,000 who have taken the exam, about 30,000 have passed, around three in four across all levels combined. In the organisers' post-exam survey, 94 percent of respondents said they finished better able to read their cat's moods and understand why it does what it does.

A share of every entry fee goes to Doubutsu Kikin, a public-interest foundation whose core programme is free spay-and-neuter surgery for cats that have no owner. Cats that have been through it get a small V-shaped notch cut into one ear, shaped to suggest a cherry blossom petal, which is why they are called sakura neko, cherry blossom cats. The foundation's argument is that sterilising strays, rather than euthanising them, is the shortest route to ending shelter killings in Japan.

In a 2024 announcement, the organisers said they had agreed to support work by Professor Hidehiko Uchiyama's animal behaviour lab at the Tokyo University of Agriculture, which studies what cats do for the people they live with.

For the anniversary they ran a survey of their own, polling 3,145 cat owners across Japan between June 8 and 28, 2026. Ninety-two percent said they feel they can hold a conversation with their cat. The most common trigger: the cat answers when called.

Why Japan turns everything into a test

There are kentei in Japan for kanji, wine, colour theory, World Heritage sites, and hundreds of regional specialisms. Almost all are privately run, none are legally required, and passing one rarely does a thing for your career.

The local-pride variety boomed in the mid-2000s and then fell apart. Nikkei reported in 2014 that the number of regional kentei registered with a Tokyo industry body had dropped from 135 in 2009 to 77 by 2013. Sixty-two closed; four new ones opened. Municipal subsidies dried up and candidates stopped showing.

The Neko Kentei went the other direction. Cumulative entries passed 10,000 around the fourth exam in 2020 and have roughly quadrupled since. It helps that the subject matter never stops being relevant and is, for most candidates, currently sitting on the sofa.

None of which makes the certificate worth anything on paper. Japan requires no licence to keep a cat, and passing confers nothing an employer would care about. What it buys is a structured excuse to learn what onions do to feline blood and what a raised tail means, before any of it matters rather than after.

Does anything like this exist where you are? And the harder question: should people have to prove they know some of this before they take a cat home?

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