I spent a beautiful Sunday in May of this year taking a national law exam. I did not pass and wasn't expecting to: I could barely work up the energy for the 90-minute commute to the test venue in Osaka, let alone study for it.

Of the 6,477 who took the exam last year, only 116 passed — I bet they cracked a book or two. Personally, I consider life too precious to spend studying for an exam with a 98.2 percent failure rate. Even if by some miracle I had passed, it would have only made me eligible to sit for a similar exam on essentially the same subject matter with a pass rate in 2012 of just 25 percent.