The Eikaiwa Mafia

Eikaiwa is Japanese for English conversation school.  Eikaiwa covers public school (kindergarten, elementary, junior high, high school), and also private institutions.

I lived and worked in Japan for five years teaching English as a second language, and worked for three companies.  My first year, I worked for an English conversation company called Nova, which is now out of business and its president is currently serving a 2-year jail sentence for embezzlement.  Nova wasn't like a public school with desks, a black board and a principal.  Nova is a lot more small-scale where students, young and old, come to an office and practice English in cubicles in groups of 1-4 people with a teacher.


After I was done with that, I worked in public schools as an ALT, which stands for Assistant Language Teacher.  My second year I worked for RCS Corporation and then my third through fifth year, I worked for JALSS.  And things went downhill from there.

Here's how the ALT system works.The teachers usually don't work directly for the schools.  They work for a middle man (companies such as Interac, TRILLS, Heart Corporation, RCS Corporation, and JALSS).

Officially, the job description is “team teaching,” but in reality, the job can go from the foreign teacher doing absolutely everything, to the foreign teacher being a human tape recorder.   The latter means that all that the teacher does is read from a textbook and the students repeat after him or her and nothing more; easy money, but boring as hell.
Now let’s go back to the structure of how the overall system works.  There are three entities here: the school, the middle man, and the teacher.


The middle man farms out numerous teachers to various school boards, but teachers still have to interview with the school boards.  The school gives all the teachers’ salary to the middle man.  The middle man takes their cut and gives the rest to the teacher.


If the teacher ever has a problem (language barrier, finding an apartment, advice, trouble at school, etc.) they call the middle man, and the middle man will help.  In theory, the school gives 300,000 yen a month to the middle man (about U.S. $3,000); middle man takes their 50,000 yen cut (about U.S. $500) and gives the rest to the teacher.  In theory....

And now for more reality:

Towards the end of my stay, the middle men became more and more corrupt.  Frequently, these companies will make promises they have NO intention of keeping.  For example, they'll write into a contract that travel costs will be paid for, and then never pay them.  They promise large contract completion bonuses, dangle them in front of the teacher like a carrot, and then take them away; making up excuses such as: the teacher was late, the school complained, or the teacher took too many sick days.  All of them complete and total fabrications! In fact, sick days were written in the contracts, but pay would be deducted anyway for taking a sick day!

At the last company I worked for, JALSS, they started becoming averse to doing their jobs. Many times, whenever I would call my company and ask for help, they'd hardly ever pick up the phone.  Or when they did, their reply was always, "It's not my job."

But it gets even better!  The companies would start to demand more money from the schools and give less to the teachers.  JALSS created a brilliantly nefarious scheme to short-change their teaching personnel.

JALSS, headed by the villainous Muhammed Ali Mustaffa, a.k.a. "Max Ali", came up with a new salary plan.  The plan was to pay the teacher a salary based on 22 working days a month and no payment for August (when school is not in session).  The teacher will only be paid when they are literally at the school.  This means that if there are less than 22 working days, perhaps due to national holidays, the teacher will not be paid for that day, and their salaries will be deducted.  Only one time during the school year was there ever a month with 22 working days.  As a final insult, JALSS, my last employer, stiffed me out of my last paycheck, but according to the Japanese Foreign Worker’s Caucus, this is a common practice.

Now, many of these Eikaiwas are run by non-Japanese.  My former boss at JALSS was Egyptian-American, and my boss at RCS was Japanese American.  The thing is the Japanese public schools, the Labor Standards Office, and the government turn a blind eye to their illegal practices, knowing full well how corrupt and devious they are!

So friends, like I said before.  Japan is a wonderful place to visit!  I highly recommend taking a vacation there!  It would be a wonderful adventure!

Living and working there…not so much.  If you want to make a difference in education, Japan ain’t no place for no hero.  So says the song.

Japan...The Not So Good Stuff

Arguably, Japan is one of the most corrupt First World governments in the modern world.  Let me tell you a little story about a merry little scandal.  This one's a doosey.

In September of 2007, Japan got itself a new Prime Minister, Yasuo Fukuda. The previous one, Shinzo Abe, had resigned after serving for only one year.  Usual length of term for Prime Minister is four years, just like America.

Abe resigned mostly due to falling approval ratings which were below 30% for several months. But arguably, the biggest problem were the guys running the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries.

The beginning of the end was when Shinzo Abe's Agricultural Minister Toshikatsu Matsuoka, committed suicide due to questions about various scandalous practices.  Prior to his death, he faced formal inquiries over high utility expenses in a rent-free office - he had claimed more than 28 million yen ($236,600).  These monies included political donations, and excessive utility expenses (about $42,000) even though Matsuoka had a small office.  He said it was due to the purchase of purified water, because people rarely drink tap water, he said.

On May 28, 2007, hours before facing questioning in the Diet (parliament), he committed suicide by hanging in his Tokyo apartment and died at Keio University hospital in Tokyo.  Matsuoka's vice minister said that Matsuoka had used the money on geisha, Japanese press reported, but he retracted his comments the next day, saying it was only a joke (yeah right).

But the next guy, Norihiko Akagi, was just as scummy.  Not even two months after being inaugurated, Akagi found himself indicted in a political funding scandal not entirely different from the one his predecessor, had been embroiled in.   He was alleged to have registered multi-million yen expenditures on an office which did not exist!  Was this guy a politician or a mobster!?  Akagi was asked to make receipts official, (whatever that means) but refused.  On July 17, he appeared at a press conference with two adhesive bandages on his face, puzzling reporters but still refusing to make receipts official.  I saw it.  It looked like he went to fight club, but forgot to fight.  He didn't actually fight anyone, nor did he get hurt, he just put them on and nobody knows why.  Very strange.

Akagi resigned as Minister on August 1st after the upper house elections (which are like American Congressional elections).  Minister of the Environment, Masatoshi Wakabayashi, became temporary Minister of Agriculture until they were able to find a replacement.

Think it was over?  No no no... So Abe wanted to reshuffle his cabinet after the Upper House elections, and the next gangste- I mean politician- he chose was Takehiko Endo.  If you would have bet he was dirty, you would have won that bet.  Seven days after Endo took up the the position of Agriculture Minister, he resigned due to yet another scandal that was uncovered.  Details were unavailable.

So now the new guy for Agriculture Minister was Masatoshi Wakabayashi; the temp who took over after Akagi.   He was clean...until 2010.

In March 2010, Wakabayashi resigned from the Diet after being accused of pressing the voting button for fellow lawmaker Mikio Aoki, whose Diet seat was next to him.  Aoki was absent from a house plenary vote that day. 

So let's recap. We got three stooges: Matsuoka, Akagi, and Endo.

1. Matsuoka commits suicide to escape questions of corruption, and is replaced by Akagi.

2. Akagi takes over as Ag. Minister, but resigns due to corruption and is replaced by Endo.

3. Endo takes over as Ag. Minister, but resigns due to corruption and is replaced by Wakabayashi; the temp who took over between Akagi and Endo.

Boy, the Abe Gang had quite a few colorful characters, huh?  So after all this crap, and for approval ratings below 30% for several months, "Honest Abe" resigned after exactly one year as Japan's prime minister.  Abe said his unpopularity was hindering the passage of an anti-terrorism law, involving among other things, Japan's continued military presence in Afghanistan. Party officials also said the Prime Minister was suffering from poor health. On September 26, Abe officially ended his term as Yasuo Fukuda became the 91st (!) Prime Minister of Japan. The office of Prime Minister has existed since 1885, and in its current form since 1947 (America has had 44 since 1789).
 

At least he had the good sense to take a hint and know when to leave when he knew he was doing a bad job .

You might be thinking, but Brandon, that's just the government.  That doesn't mean everything is corrupt.  Stay tuned for the next post, friends.