If you are talking about ranking for the keyword "japanese" then I would say very difficult. Keyword Discovery Stats Occurrences KEI Predicted Daily Searches 75,600,000 4.986 19,416 Basically you got tons of competition.
Basically everthing is possible. When you do a search on google.com for the keyword "Japanese" you'll find japanese-online.com on the first position. Now investigate what you'll need to beat this. There are about 313.000.000 results for the keyword japanese. First off all the keyword is in the url, the website was created in 1996 so will be out of the sandbox for years now. According to marketleap there are about 289 BLs in google, 7080 in msn and about 3580 in yahoo and they have about 168 pages indexed in google for this website. With unique content and many, many backlinks I believe it's doable to beat this website but I think it will take you atleast a year or more to get any results.
Maybe you should think about trying to rank well for a phrase or word combination that inclused the word Japanese, for example Japanese language training or Japanese art or Japanese travel destinations. You might find the odds of doing well considerably better. And confronted with 313 million results for a one word search, most people do what Google and the other search engines suggest they do, which is to add more relevant words to the search term. I came across an article recently with statistics on this issue - can't seem to locate it right now but the gist was that a majority of actual recent searches on the net were 2-4 word terms.
I wouldn't waste time going after a keyword that competitive. I would try what was suggested above. You may also want to try intentionally finding different ways of misspelling the word Japanese. You would be surprised how many people misspell the word when doing a search. I have intentionally misspelled keywords on my sites and have got lots of visits because of it with little competition.
Minstrel has the best suggestion. Try optimizing for words that have japanese in them - there are millions of them. Start to rank for those, and eventually japanese would come. Not sure you'd want a general 1 keyword phrase, but if its your goal, follow minstrel's advice.
I disagree, why spend your time ranking for lesser keywords? You will lose in the long-term. If you have a Japanese language training site, for example, optimizing for "japanese" will most likely get you good rankings for "japanese language training", "japanese ...".
Chances of him landing the word Japanese is slim to none. No offense. But the chances or keywords with less competion are just that, less competitive. I would always go for less competitive keywords to target. If he has a Title that says "Japanese" and has in his content "Japanese" and puts the keyword "Japanese" in all of his anchor texts this would be way less effective than using "Japanses Language Training"
Not only that but if I'm looking for Japanese art, how likely am I to type in just the word "Japanese"? Answer: I can't imagine EVER doing that. What I would type in would be "Japanese art" and go from there, maybe adding in a city or state name or something to narrow it down further.
Thanks for the great tips guys. Also I have noticed that google, at times, really favors domains with the keywords in them. Like japanese-art.com would be good for "japanese art" what do you think?