As I settle into my third month in Japan on the JET Program, thousands of other foreigners in Japan are facing eviction from their apartments, searching for new jobs and going day-to-day unsure about from where they might get their next meal.This is because Nova, Japan's largest English conversation school and the nation's largest employer of foreigners, has gone belly up after months of scandal that highlighted years of shady business practices ... that short-changed students and treated instructors and domestic staffers like, well, bunny crap.
The story is still making headlines. Here's the UK's Independent from the Nov. 5 edition:
In a country teeming with cute cartoon characters, few are cuter or better known than the Nova bunny. The pink mascot stood in the doorways of language schools across Japan, promising a short educational encounter with an exotic foreigner. But now, thousands of teachers and students have found that the bunny bites, hard.
The collapse of Nova, Japan's biggest employer of foreigners, has left 4,000 teachers – including more than 900 from the UK – stranded without work, money and, in some cases, a place to live. "There are people who don't know where their next meal is coming from," said Bob Tench, an official with Nova's union. "It's very distressing."http://news.independent.co.uk/world/asia/article3129679.ece
Nova started back in the early '80s, when Japan was booming and so too was English. Native speakers of the world's language to come to Japan and make $100 an hour, says this take in the Christian Science Monitor.
When I was doing my "what if I went to Japan and taught English" research on the Web, I found mostly bad reviews for Nova from past and present instructors. Some of the complaints were common to all English conversation schools -- the emphasis is on sales, they only want you for short periods, little chance for promotion, little valuable work experience. But Nova had the worst deal, said the consensus. They sometimes shoved three instructors into one apartment and made them all pay full price. (They also paid the rent directly, deducting from salaries, so when they went bush they also forced their screwed-over teachers to deal with angry landlords.)
In recent months, more and more complaints from students came to the surface, which got more attention in the Japanese media. Nova was signing up students for up to three years in advance for lessons. If students ever decided that they didn't like what they had paid for, Nova wouldn't offer refunds. Japan's high court squashed this practice in the summer and governing bodies imposed limits on Nova's operations. Then as October faded to black the Pink Bunny filed for bankruptcy, closing its doors across Japan and leaving students without refunds and teachers without livelihoods.
In Ise, a couple from England who had been working for Nova got out just in time and found new jobs in the area. They also traded in their Nova apartment for one just as big but for half the price. They're wise; they're lucky. One other local Nova teacher, who had just arrived this summer, left Ise last week to stay with her sister on a U.S. military base near Tokyo. She's also lucky in that she has a place to go but she would like to stay in Japan, and finding a job right now is going to be tough for anyone in the English industry.
Meanwhile, the word is that court-appointed overseers, who fired the corrupt president of the company last week, are trying to line-up a savior for the chain, somebody to re-invest, pay off debts, and give some teachers their jobs back. But it's unclear if any company is willing to scoop up the damaged goods.
And finally, enjoy this video for some backgrounds on the terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad company:
No comments:
Post a Comment