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.
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