Around 1993, in an unsuccessful bid to secure a Working VISA in Japan, I grudgingly accepted a position working for the infamous chain-school, NOVA.
For those unfamiliar, NOVA was by far the largest private English conversation school in the country, boasting just over 2,000 branches with locations next to practically every major subway station in the country; to say nothing of the TV commercials, cuddly mascots and sing-along jingles that flooded the airwaves and subway billboards across the land. The monolithic enterprise was cynically referred to as the “McDonalds” of language schools in Japan.
For westerners, though, the organization was considered little more than a teaching factory, with no real training program to speak of, nor a viable curriculum for its infinite number of students. The company thrived by shrewdly enticing naive and often star-struck customers to take out whopping loans in order to cover whopping tuitions, before planting them before a mishmash of untrained, fresh-off-the-boat foreigners, many of whom had a lot more on their minds than just teaching. I called it lambs to the slaughter.
For male teachers, particularly those working at one of Nova’s mega-branches like Tennoji or Umeda, some of them quite innocently met the love of their lives, ran off and got married. For others, it was mere looting and pillaging, with the occasional uncertainty as to who was seducing whom; the teacher or the student.
Such were the times in Japan.
Once a student became disillusioned with the process, which didn't take very long, they evaporated like the morning mist, which suited management just fine since the company got its cash up front with no profit incentive to service the client once money changed hands. The student was still on the hook for the loan, of course.
Meanwhile, the well-oiled marketing machine continued to drive unwitting pigeons through an efficient sales apparatus; one hell-bent on sustaining an ambitious sales quota that stretched back more than two decades.
During that time, NOVA literally had a license to print money; that is, until the government - following public outcry - jailed the corporate president, Nozomu Sahashi, for fraud and embezzlement prompting the company to go belly up in 2007.
It was the scandal of the decade.
The collapse of NOVA as well as the fate of its beleaguered president dominated national headlines and newsreels for months to come, setting in motion a chain of events that reeked havok on the "Eikaiwa" industry in Japan. The domino effect was swift and destructive leaving 80% of the sizable English schools out of business.
Wisdom21, the school I founded, enjoyed substantial growth and expansion until the day the phones stopped ringing, an indirect result of the Nova scandal leading to our nationwide closure.
The sudden shake out and restructuring of the private language school industry in Japan is one of the many topics I'll be addressing in my soon-to-be-released memoir, 21 Years of Wisdom. Thanks for reading!
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