Tim Leffel’s Cheapest Destinations

4,000 English Teachers in Japan Out of Work

Last Friday the Wall Street Journal reported that Japan’s largest private English tutoring school, Nova Corp., closed its operations last week, leaving over 4,000 teachers unpaid and stranded. For now anyway you can find the article online. Japanese Lesson: How Do You Say ‘Taken for a Ride’?

It’s usually the teachers in Korea who get screwed, with the Japanese English schools having a great reputation in comparison. As a current or future ESL teacher though, it’s important to remember that the parents, teachers, and school owners do not share the same interests. Parents want to impress their friends and give their little tykes a real or perceived edge. Teachers want to earn some money in a foreign culture and (usually) make some real progress in helping people learn English. Owners want to make as much money as possible and in my experience as an ESL teacher, that’s usually as far as it goes.

In this case, the man running the show got especially greedy, according to the Journal.

Nozomu Sahashi, the company’s quirky founder, was fired last week as president and has dropped from sight. Now, worrisome details are trickling out: The 56-year-old executive had quietly moved profits from publicly traded Nova to his private company, a court-appointed administrator alleged at a news conference. The administrators, who are scrambling to find a sponsor to help turn around Nova, showed reporters his lavish office, which has a Jacuzzi, a tea room and a secret bedroom.

What makes this worse than the usual event of someone getting laid off is that ESL teachers in East Asia usually get paid once a month, their apartment is furnished by the school, and the school is the one paying airfare home for the teacher. All fine until it doesn’t happen.

Now, the Nova teachers are jobless and those who have lived from paycheck to paycheck are stuck in Japan. Some have been threatened with eviction from their apartments because Nova, which had provided housing and deducted the rent from teachers’ salaries, stopped paying rent months ago.

If you’ve got a friend or relative who was working for Nova in Japan, you might want to extend them a loan to get home. If you’ve been talking to a Nova recruiter, do not pass go, do not collect $200. Sayonara!