Exams are always going to be nerve-wracking no matter how old we get, I imagine 😅
Except when you know you can ace it like a bald hero pro!

As always, for those who want to skip straight to the chapter, here it is: JNC

Aaaand here are the notes:

1. “Shinmyoukan” is most likely a reference to “Shotokan” karate.
2. The student group reference is very likely SEALDs, or Students Emergency Action for Liberal Democracy, an originally college-based student activist organization formed in 2015 to protest Prime Minister Shinzou Abe’s proposed reinterpretation of Article 9 to enable the JSDF to not only act in self-defense, but also to “operate overseas for ‘collective self-defense’ for allies.” Protests drew up to 120,000 participants, but these security laws still passed as of Mar 29, 2016.
3. When I Googled 正拳対角四連突き (what I translated as “Four Opposing Corner Consecutive Punches”), literally all that came up was this video. According to the title of the video, this is supposedly a move by the karate 3rd dan Miake Hiroyuki, who had won the middleweight division of the All Japan Weight Category Karate Championships in 1989 and 1994.
4. “Engineer Brigade” because these are the guys that take on construction and all.
5. In the Ground Self-Defense Force, the lowest rank is Private, then Private First Class, then Leading Private. Here’s the full list.
6. Continuing from the above point (but making this a separate point for being in a different part of the text), Major General is the 3rd highest position.
7. The kilowatt (kW) is a measure of power, whereas the kilowatt-hour (kW h) is the measure of energy. As Wikipedia puts it, “Energy is the work performed; and power is the rate of delivery of energy. Energy is measured in joules, or watt seconds. Power is measured in watts, or joules per second.”
8. National Japanese energy consumption is actually around 1 TkW. (WorldData.info)
9. Most of the biggest traditional Japanese newspapers use “shimbun” in their name (the older transliteration of “shinbun”), and a lot of them are financial papers (the “kei” that’s used in the name of many papers is from the Japanese word “keizai” meaning “economy”). This one here is called Keizai Shimbun as a generic name for a financial paper.

Mm, not that many this time, and no new locations introduced. We are getting quite a bit of action though, so I hope you enjoyed it!

As always, feel free to point out grammatical mistakes, typos, and the like on either the relevant JNC forum or on the #translation-talk channel on our Discord.