Strange me looking at just about every RPG being run in Japanese for less time lost to text and seeing it banned here. I could understand banning the original Japanese release on the left and allowing the Japanese International edition on the right.

The changes in the English NTSC and PAL releases were somewhat significant with new cut scenes and famously added Ruby and Emerald weapon. The later International release does have them and presumably is in line with the Western changes:

If you separate the languages and have them compete independently from each other, then I think that's fairly uncontroversial and doesn't bar anyone who may only own the game in Japanese from being able to submit a run at all.

JP is already a separate category for the game

Yeah to expand on woadyB, JP has some differences compared to its NTSC/PAL counterparts therefore has its own catergory. Here is a link to the direct catergory for you https://www.speedrun.com/ff7?h=PSX_Disc-Any_JP_INT-Turbo&x=w20z0z8d-9l754781.0q54xnvl-wl3973wl.mlngd4o1

I still really want a JP 1.0 board. I think I vaguely remember a step route existing for (parts) of it on some super old Japanese website. I also think MD kind of wanted to step route it, but I'm not sure if I'm misremembering or whether he got around to it or not.

Ha thanks for pointing out there is a category for Japanese International Edition. I totally overlooked it. My mistake.

I'd like to see Japanese 1.0 runs and that's great there is a full video guide in English. I didn't realize limit break growth was increased for later releases.

Every source I found on first page of Google results says Japanese International is the same as the North American release except for the language. Not that anonymous wiki edits and forum posts have to be correct. I presume there could be bug fixes or more subtle changes only noticeable in speedrunning.

Where does the English PSX disc strategy fail or become suboptimal for Japanese International disc? I mean besides from use of Turbo. Comparing #1 runs, I see the Japanese Guard Scorpion fight is much faster and only needs 1 limit break. I don't know if that's due to better RNG, slower routing before the fight, or any tangible difference.

The cultural difference is interesting. Like Japanese shoot em up leaderboards allow Turbo, whereas it's typically considered cheating on English boards.

I would also love to see this as an official category. I did a run ages ago, but I wanted to improve it before I would submit. I never improved it yet, but I will one day. A video of the whole run is here (livestreamed):

https://www.youtube.com/live/oukH09fhvaA?feature=shared&t=3358