JAPAN NEWS AND DISCUSSION
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- Assistant Language Teacher (ALT) in Kanto region
- RCS (RCSコーポレーション), Kanto
- Salary: ¥180,000 ~ ¥250,000 / Month includes performance bonus
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- Assistant Language Teacher - TOKYO - late-March start
- Interac, Tokyo
- Salary: ¥230,000 ~ ¥255,000 / Month
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- Assistant Language Teacher - Kanagawa Prefecture - late-March start
- Interac, Kanagawa
- Salary: ¥230,000 ~ ¥255,000 / Month
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Simon_Foston
Add an "m" to one of those words and you're probably closer to the mark.
Posted in: Cop arrested for stealing girl's underwear during investigation
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Simon_Foston
If that's what police officers get up to no wonder other Japanese men are at it.
Posted in: Cop arrested for stealing girl's underwear during investigation
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Simon_Foston
An understandable sentiment. I suspect he's probably beyond help, though.
Posted in: Man slashes woman because he 'can't get a girlfriend'
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Simon_Foston
When the word "enjoy" is misused.
Posted in: Which words or expressions annoy you the most when you hear them repeatedly used by other people in conversation?
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Simon_Foston
Hephatsheput wrote:
This comment transcends mere tastelessness. Obviously it's another feeble attempt at wit, but if you think that you have to be staggeringly tactless and offensive to be funny, why bother?
Posted in: What is the best way to deal with the groping problem on trains?
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Simon_Foston
Well, getting back to the question of there still being "bad apples in the barrel," I can't see why there wouldn't be. I'm not aware of school operators changing their hiring practices significantly since NOVA went under, so if there were bad teachers before then there still will be now. Furthermore, most native English speakers who come here to teach only stay two or three years at the very most, and for most of them that just isn't long enough to really get good at the job. Besides, I don't know if really high standards of English can be expected in a country where the most valued indicators of English ability are multi-choice comprehension tests.
Posted in: What is your impression of the English-teaching industry in Japan? Have things improved since Nova's collapse or are there still bad apples in the barrel?
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Simon_Foston
Not having any knowledge of what these people were actually up to I'll consider any possibility at the moment. It could well be that the Yakuza decided Saruhashi needed some extra encouragement not to talk about possible organized crime involvement in NOVA's collapse to give himself a better chance in the appeal. If that's the case there are probably several layers of insulation between the people who give the orders and the ones who carried them out, and the abductors were just unlucky or stupid enough to get caught in the act. Alternatively, Saruhashi borrowed a really huge amount of money from a less sophisticated Yakuza outfit, and they decided the strong-arm tactics were necessary to set an example. I'll be interested to see if police interrogations or questions asked at Saruhashi's appeal yield any more answers.
Posted in: What is your impression of the English-teaching industry in Japan? Have things improved since Nova's collapse or are there still bad apples in the barrel?
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Simon_Foston
I never thought for even a second that Saruhashi's abduction was a random co-incidence, as I cannot imagine Yakuza wanting to kidnap anyone they don't have pretty serious issues with. Neither can I imagine why you would imply that I might think such a thing unless it was for the purpose of getting in a cheap dig at English conversation teachers, which I honestly don't see the need for.
In this instance I'm well aware of the stories that have been floating around about the NOVA/eikaiwa/Yakuza connection, and while I don't dismiss them I have seen nothing much to substantiate them. Of course if there are any hard facts available I'd be very interested to see them and would be happy to revise my opinions accordingly. At the moment though, I still think it's also possible that Saruhashi borrowed heavily from the Yakuza to try and get out of the hole he'd dug for himself, and that they're leaning on him now because he's thrown away their money. I mean, it's entirely conceivable that NOVA's collapse was indeed a Yakuza scheme, but if so it was so ingeniously planned and executed that they left absolutely no fingerprints on it - there's been quite a bit of media reporting about Saruhashi's screw-ups but absolutely nothing about possible organized crime connections. Why would people capable of such a calculated and methodical crime see any need to draw attention to themselves by kidnapping the president of the company they'd forced into bankruptcy?
Posted in: What is your impression of the English-teaching industry in Japan? Have things improved since Nova's collapse or are there still bad apples in the barrel?
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Simon_Foston
Upon what do you base that allegation? The actual facts of the matter are clear-cut and well-known. The Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry approved NOVA's policy of selling lessons in large packages at a discounted rate, and then using the full price per lesson to calculate any refunds. NOVA then more than doubled its number of schools without really increasing the number of teachers it employed, so that it became much harder for students to reserve the lessons they'd bought, which they'd been promised they could do any time they liked. When they wanted to cancel their contracts they got far less money back than they really should have done, they went to court and METI, acting far too late to deal with a problem they had allowed to happen in the first place, forbade NOVA from selling any more large lesson packages. Under such circumstances the company couldn't possibly survive.
Nothing to do with Yakuza at all, unless they were particularly stupid Yakuza with no idea how to run a profitable business, and even less to do with the quality of the teachers, although NOVA management liked to say it was rather than take any responsibility for their own incompetence.
Posted in: What is your impression of the English-teaching industry in Japan? Have things improved since Nova's collapse or are there still bad apples in the barrel?
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Simon_Foston
It's stupid and short-sighted but quite deliberate. The salaries are generally quite decent for someone who's just graduated from university and looking to make a bit of cash to pay off student loans, but not for someone who's looking at teaching English professionally and making a career out of it. Eikaiwas don't want to hire those people as they would generally prefer to waste their money on other things.
Posted in: What is your impression of the English-teaching industry in Japan? Have things improved since Nova's collapse or are there still bad apples in the barrel?
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Simon_Foston
In that respect I think eikaiwa is like a lot of other businesses here, especially the small and medium-sized enterprises the politicians are always telling us have to be protected. They just spring up without any regard for profitability or however many other people might be running the same kind of business in the same area, so there's no way there could ever be enough consumer demand to keep them all profitable. That's also one of the things that did for NOVA - the reckless expansion meant the different NOVA schools were competing with each other rather than rival companies. Less schools and less teachers definitely wouldn't be a bad thing.
Posted in: What is your impression of the English-teaching industry in Japan? Have things improved since Nova's collapse or are there still bad apples in the barrel?
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Simon_Foston
The English-teaching industry has not adapted itself to current economic circumstances and the fundamental drop in demand for the service it provides. The whole English conversation teaching model is now obsolete because it is a luxury that people are deciding they cannot afford and do not really need. English is sold as a hobby and a tool for travelling and making foreign friends, and so it's going to be even less appealing now to those who have neither travel plans nor any chances to meet native English speakers - quite often, the only time students can use their English skills is when they are talking to their teachers. For Japanese people in this situation all the English they need is available from self-study books and NHK. Basically, I think eikaiwas have to change their whole business pattern and focus more on English test preparation for people who need good TOEIC, TOEFL or Eiken scores on their C.V.s, and English that would be useful in various work situations in Japan, e.g. for a JR employee handling questions from English-speaking travellers. In any case there is no way the school operators can continue running things the way they do at the moment.
Posted in: What is your impression of the English-teaching industry in Japan? Have things improved since Nova's collapse or are there still bad apples in the barrel?
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Simon_Foston
Sorry to sound callous, but whose fault is it that this person grew up to be a useless unemployed sociopath? I'm appalled by Yuji Hayashi's actions and his thinking behind them, but when people are raised in an atmosphere where there's no sense of love, few or no attempts at understanding or communication, and lots of expectations but no encouragement, this is exactly the kind of thing that's going to happen.
Posted in: Man arrested for attempted murder after hitting parents with golf club
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Simon_Foston
Quite right. There were quite a few things bubbling up for a while, and most of them had little to do with Aso - rising unemployment, the mishandling of the pensions records, the steady trickle of LDP corruption scandals and the damage done to regional economies by Koizumi's reforms, which no one knew how to follow up on. It was also abundantly clear in 2006 that the LDP old boys had only gone along with Koizumi because he was winning elections, because they wanted to get right back to pork barrel, money and patronage politics with Shinzo Abe and other spineless yes-men who would tow the party line. None of that was really Aso's fault - the writing was on the wall when the LDP lost their Upper House majority in 2007, but Aso did nothing to turn the situation around.
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Simon_Foston
Aso was easily as lame as either Fukuda (smart but weak) or Abe (stupid and weak). The best his government managed was a fractional upturn in the economy that no one felt the benefits of, and his choice of Cabinet Ministers like Shoichi Nakagawa and Toshihiro Nikai, mired in the same Nishimatsu scandal as Ichiro Ozawa, indicates that his political instincts were just as bad as Abe's. Aso did make some of the right noises about Japan's problems, but didn't actually seem inclined to do anything about them. Still, it's wrong to pile all the blame for the LDP's defeat on Aso alone, as I think people were voting against the party itself just as much as they were voting against the man in charge.
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Simon_Foston
I explicitly said I didn't have high hopes for the DPJ. This is due in part to the fact that Ozawa has continued to be influential in the party, which suggests that LDP backroom politics and palliatives rather than cures for economic ills will continue as usual. But let's see what happens after they've actually been sworn in.
Posted in: Ozawa's comeback as DPJ secretary-general worries some
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Simon_Foston
A liberal who served in Vietnam himself and was decorated for it, and had his own service spat on by Bush and Cheney's attack dogs in 2004. Still, even if they'd had the decency not to make Kerry's record an issue, I suspect he'd have probably lost anyway.
Posted in: Kerry positions himself as Kennedy's political heir
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Simon_Foston
No they didn't. I'd hardly call four PMs in four years a sign of a stable government. I don't have especially high hopes for the DPJ, but at least they've demonstrated that Japan has become a healthy democracy, in which voters can kick out a ruling party that's become corrupt and useless.
Posted in: Ozawa's comeback as DPJ secretary-general worries some
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Simon_Foston
Oh, I see. I wasn't entirely sure what you meant by "gaikoku." Still, as it's generally thought that the economic crisis started in the US and was exacerbated by insufficient government regulation, I'm guessing that if you acknowledge this to be generally correct you'd rather blame Bill Clinton for it than George W. Bush. Moreover, I think the writing was on the wall for the LDP long before the current crisis blew up - they were pretty much doomed from the moment Koizumi quit and they picked that feeble non-entity Abe to take his place. I seem to recall that the economic situation seemed to be more or less okay when the LDP got their arses handed to them on a plate in the 2007 upper house election, so the worldwide crisis was just one of the final nails in the coffin.
A prosperity built on an unhealthy over-reliance on exports. While the major exporters were doing a brisk trade, the domestic economy was allowed to remain chronically weak, which I think was a deliberate ploy to keep businesses dependent on political patronage, and no one in the LDP or bureaucracy ever anticipated the overseas demand drying up. So, while a lot of Japan's current problems were doubtless caused by the international economic crisis, the others were caused by the LDP. I hope the new 'minister for economic recovery' will look back at LDP financial policies as a good example of what NOT to do.
Posted in: Hatoyama to create economic recovery post
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Simon_Foston
Really? Then I take it you were just being sarcastic. If not, do you agree with Hatoyama's opinion that a lot of Japan's problems have been caused by unhealthy adherence to American-style market fundamentalism?
Posted in: Hatoyama to create economic recovery post