The Eye of Patrick

Lately in the media there has been many articles about the collapse of NOVA corporation. This has resulted in a unique situation in Japan where a large group of foreigners have found themselves unemployed and rather then lay down and return to their home country they are trying to fight it. Whether this is a smart move I do not know, I would feel a desire to fight something that i feel is unjust, but at the same time Japan is not the greatest country to go unemployed with the high cost of living. Plus with so many teachers not being able to make rent payment many landlords are going through the process of evicting them. This may create a further backlash against renting apartment to foreigners.

When Natasha Steele came to Japan from her native Australia earlier this year to teach English, she was looking forward to immersing herself in a foreign culture while earning a little money on the side. Now, after the spectacular collapse of her employer, Japan’s biggest English language school chain, Steele has found herself jobless, threatened with eviction and hungry. “I was taken out and afterward, she took me to a bakery and told me I could have anything I wanted,” she says of one charitable student. “She just wanted to know I had enough food for at least two weeks.”

For many college graduates from English-speaking countries, spending a few months in Japan teaching English is a time-honored tradition. But after Nova shut the doors of its more than 800 locations worldwide last week, that tradition is looking precarious. The closure has left over 300,000 Nova students deprived of their prepaid English lessons, and many of its 5,000 foreign language teachers, like Steele, unlikely charity cases.

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