Hopefully I will be able to turn my blog back to more things about my time. But knowning a lot of you who read my blog are likely interested in teaching English in Japan. I thought it would be good to share news on NOVA and its demise so that people do not make the mistake to apply to them or wonder why it is difficult to get an English teaching job at the moment.

Nova union seeks way to hold classes

A union for Nova Corp. employees is calling on students and teachers to meet outside their old schools Saturday so they can find a way to continue classes independently of the failed foreign-language school chain.

The union is organizing the campaign to give both students and teachers an opportunity to negotiate their own terms for lessons, said Kristen Moon of the Nova branch of the National Union of General Workers Tokyo Nambu.

Read more: Japan Times

Nova fall just simple math: it bled red 

Tsutomu Kuji, author of “Nova Shoho no Maryoku” (”The Magical Power of the Nova Business”), has tracked Nova’s rapid expansion in the 1990s, when it took advantage of the burst in the bubble economy and consequent land price plunge to acquire and rent classrooms at low cost. Then came another economic slump, but the chain continued to pursue expansion and splurge on ads, as Sahashi pursued his extravagant lifestyle.

Kuji wrote how Nova attracted new students with eye-catching commercials, talked them into paying tens of thousands of yen for lesson tickets for up to three years in advance and then short-changed refunds to students who grew dissatisfied with what they had paid for.

Read more: Japan Times

 NOVA to sell 33 percent of schools to G.education

G.education will immediately take over 30 of 669 schools that were operated by NOVA, according to the administrators. The company aims to ultimately take over up to 200 NOVA schools in total.

Read more: Mainichi News 

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.

Continue article: Times

This was our dinner at the hostel we stayed at in Rebun. It was fresh salmon,veggies and of course miso soup.

Students feed foreign teachers as Japan school fails

TOKYO, Nov 1 (Reuters) - Foreign teachers stranded by the collapse of Japan’s largest language school said on Thursday they were broke and being fed by their students, as media revealed a secret bedroom and opulent offices enjoyed by the firm’s founder.

Nova Corp, which ran a chain of 900 language schools, filed for court protection from creditors last week, leaving thousands of mostly foreign employees unpaid and students without the lessons they paid for.

“I have a couple of thousand yen ($20) left in the bank. I am expecting an eviction notice any day,” Kristen Moon, a teacher from the United States, told a news conference in Tokyo, at which she appeared dressed as a pink rabbit character that Nova used in advertising.

Australian Natasha Steele was on the verge of tears as she said her students were feeding her.

Union officials said there were plans to barter language lessons for food for the teachers.

“This is a crisis that is rapidly going to turn into a tragedy if we don’t do something about it,” said Nova union representative Bob Tench, a teacher from Britain. “There are people who don’t know where their next meal is coming from.”

Former company president Nozumu Sahashi, who founded the chain in 1981, pursued aggressive expansion by tying students into multi-year contracts and squeezing teachers’ pay, as he made the firm a household.

He paid himself 310 million yen ($2.7 million) for the year to March 2006, Kyodo news agency said, compared with about 3 million yen ($26,000) for an instructor — about one-third below the average annual wage in high-cost Japan.

Sahashi’s lavish 300 square metre (3,200 sq ft) personal office in Osaka was opened to media this week, revealing a hidden apartment complete with a bedroom, hot tub and sauna.

Sahashi was ousted by Nova’s board of directors last week and has not appeared in public since.

The Nova teachers’ union is planning to set up a rescue fund for those whose savings have run dry after the company failed to pay them this month, and some foreign embassies have also offered assistance.

Nova teachers were employed on one-year contracts and many of them had not worked for long enough to be eligible for unemployment benefits, union official Louis Carlet said.

Administrators are seeking a rescuer for Nova but analysts have expressed doubts as to whether the firm, which faces delisting from the Jasdaq Securities Exchange on Nov. 27, will be able to lure back students who abandoned it in droves. ($1=115.41 Yen)
Click Source: Reuters

Christopher Johnson
SPECIAL TO THE STAR
TOKYO–An estimated 4,000 foreign teachers, including about 660 from Canada, are without jobs after Japan’s largest school chain, Nova Group, closed its 900 schools and declared bankruptcy yesterday.

Many teachers are owed $4,000 in salary for September and October, said Catherine Campbell, a Cape Breton native who has taught English at various schools during 13 years in Japan.

“For many people, their rent has not been paid either, if they live in Nova housing,” said Campbell, who now represents teachers in Japan’s National Union of General Workers.

Read more: Toronto Star

I am not sure if I have posted about my placement. But I finally found out where I will be going. I will be going to Shimokawa, Hokkaido. If you are anything like me, you are wondering where is that.Shimokawa is located in the nothern part of hokkaido. It is about 2-3 hours from Sapporo by train. The town contains about 4,000 people (plus or minus census source). Its primary industries are logging and farming. On the right there is a map of it so that you can have a clearer picture of shimokawa, hokkaido.Being selected to live in Hokkaido is an interesting event, as when i made my application for the JET program I had selected no place because I thought that I would get sent where i was meant to be, plus there was just to many places i wanted to go to in Japan. So when I found out I was going to hokkaido i was excited. I started googling it and ran into a lack of information. The wiki post on it just states the location and the population. So I dug even further and asked my Japanese friends to help me locate more information, even in Japanese there was not too much.

So I was happy to hear from the person I will be taking over. He called me and we talked about it. From the sounds of it, I really lucked out for many reasons.

1. I will have western toliet that flushes, this is not that common in hokkaido supposely.

2. I will be getting a brand new heater! so those winters will not be too cold.

3. I can get high speed internet, which supposely is not that common in small towns of 4000 people. I can’t imagine life without highspeed!

4. My rent will be 72 dollars a month due to my town helping me.

5. It comes more or less fully furnished.

6. My town has an Indian and Italian resturant.

So I was happy about that, plus my schools I will be teaching at are very nice too, from grade K-12 and also and adult class. He mentioned that the adults are very nice and friendly and can actually speak english. I should only be teaching 2-3 years a day, but have to spend the other time at the BOE. This means I will have a lot of time to study Japanese, which is one of the reason for me wanting to go to Japan.

He also mentioned that there is many festivals and that my town has two local festivals. One is an ice candle festival. You are probably thinking Ice candles? but doesn’t water put fire out, and yes that is the case. But in Shimokawa, hokkaido they have a special way.

This is what my pred said: “To make an ice candle you first take a bucket and fill it with water. Now leave it outside overnight, exposed to the frigid temperatures. By morning, the top and sides of the bucket will have frozen but the bottom and core
will still be liquid. So, turn the bucket upside down, and drop out the contents — they form a large ice ‘cup’ around the remaining unfrozen water. Pour out the water, wait until night, put a candle inside then light it, and voila! You have an ice candle. As I’m sure you can imagine, these are quite beautiful objects.”

He also told me that there was many opportunities to get involved in the community through events and festivals. I look forward to that, and that was part of the reason I requested to be put in a small town, as I wanted to get a unique Japanese experience.

Seeing that it is hokkaido, there is lots of skiing and from what I have heard it is just covered in them. I can’t wait to ski again, while living in Ontario I have not had much desire to ski as the hills are poor, but some of the hills in Japan are used for super G and other races so the quality must be good. Also the ski season runs from Nov to May and it is only 20-40 dollars a day, which is very cheap. I heard that many people go skiing 15-20 times in the ski season, so I hope to learn to snowboard while there.

On the right I included some photos of my apartment, I hope you enjoy them. Have any of you been to Hokkaido, tell me about it?

Patrick

Before I start to talk about the JET (The Japan Exchange and Teaching Programme) program, I will give a short history of how I ended up in the JET program.

During my one-year exchange in Japan, I started to fall in love with the place. It felt like I belonged here and that it was natural for me to be in Japan. Do not get my wrong; my Japanese is not great so there were many communication problems. Nevertheless, while in Japan I felt a sense of belonging. The people, the environment and culture where all things that had grown on me and caused me to want to be there longer. I realized finally that I wanted to return to Japan when I noticed things I did not like about Japan. The long work hours of family friends parents, the practice of following most rules to the T and so on. However, even with all those things that were not great about Japan I still liked it more then ever. For me that is a true test of whether the place is good for me. That after being there for a while and seeing the things that I like and dislike that is still like it.

So back to my exchange, I was nearing the end of my stay at Kansai Gaidai in Hirakata, Osaka, Japan and realized I wanted to return.

The common way to return to Japan is teaching English. If you make the decision to be an English teacher there is another two routes you can go. First, the common things required for both JET and Eikaiwa or English Conversation Schools are:

- University degree – this is required to get a work permit in Japan.

- Native English speaker for the majority of the education, though it may depend on the company you are applying for.

The first being ‘Eikaiwa’ or English Conversation schools. These are the large English schools that you usually find at the exits of major train stations in Japan. They are everywhere and the big schools are Geos, NOVA, ECC, Aeon and so on. While there are many other smaller English conversation schools.

When you apply to one of them, you must go for an interview in one of the cities they have listed for interviews. During the interview, you will probably have to give a demo lesson and they will test how you handle a class (the interviewers will probably pretend to be students). My knowledge of this area is very limited because I decided to go the JET route.

I know that the large schools will help you to get a Visa, but will require you to make payment on your own plane ticket, but will reimburse you after a year and may pay for you to go home in the holidays. They just want to make sure that you don’t ditch them when you get to Japan.

They usually will provide company housing, where you will share a room with other English teachers. This can be a positive thing as it gives you a small of group of people you know when you move to a new country. But it can be a negative in that they will deduct the cost of rent from your salary whether you occupy the apartment or live outside in your own private residences.

The pay for these schools is usually very similar and in writing this article, I checked out NOVA. They have two types of employment, one is Sponsored Instructors and these are people who probably work around 29-33 hours a week and they earn between 2,768,000-3,624,00￥ or 24,783-32,448 USD per year.

NOVA also has a program called “Flexi-Schedule teachers” they are teachers who work less hours; this is probably a good way to test the NOVA environment without committing to it full time. The pay is obviously less and it ranges between 2,340,000-2,613,000￥ or 20,939.60- 23,382.55 USD.

The reason that many people decide to go this route and use the private communication schools is because they are located in the city. If you want to have a chance to see Tokyo, Osaka, or Kyoto this is the route to go. They usually have many openings and are fairly accommodating about where you end up. Many people use the large schools to get to Japan and then look for employment elsewhere. This is because many of the smaller schools in Japan will only hire you if you are already in Japan and have a Visa, while the large schools will usually sponsor your Visa. That is why they require you to buy your own plane ticket.

I personally can’t say whether or not this is the route to go to end up in Japan. I can tell you that I have read many stories of people either loving or hating it. It really depends on your where you end up. Though if you decide to teach in one of the large schools, you will not have much freedom in what is being taught as the course material is tightly controlled and you are required to follow it exactly. This can be a bonus to someone who wants to come to Japan and party and have a good time and not worry about doing much work. But some people have felt like they became trained monkeys.

Some websites to check out if you are interested in teaching through an agency or private conversation school are:

Schools

Nova - http://www.teachinjapan.com/

Geos - http://www.geoscareer.com/

AeonNet - http://www.aeonet.com/

ECC - http://www.japanbound.com/

General Job sites in Japan

A popular site for jobs in Japan - www.gaijinpot.com

Has lot of information, and resources - http://www.eltnews.com/

Helps you find students while in Japan - http://www.findateacher.net/

This is the conclusion to Part 1 of teaching English in Japan. In this part I covered the private converstation schools or “Eikaiwa”. I hope this information provides you with a general introduction to the field, if you have any more questions please do not hesitate to ask by leaving a comment. Next time I will go into the JET program and how it works. This is the route I chose to come to Japan on and I hope I can provide you with a understand of why I chose JET.

So till next time,

Ja-ne,

Patrick