You want me to do WHAT to your daughters?

One thing I kind of miss from my early days of living in Japan is the language barrier.  Life can be a lot more entertaining when you do not have the slightest clue as to what is going on.  For example, when a woman invited me to sleep with her twin daughters.

So I was teaching an adult class back when I first moved to Japan.  One of my first classes consisted of several middle aged house wives in a beginning English class.  After a few weeks, one member of the class announced with a grin that I should sleep with her twin daughters.

The rest of the class brightened and nodded in agreement- apparently it would be a very good idea if I slept with the womans twin daughters.

To this notion I replied (being the suave and sophisticated individual that I am)  “uh…..o…k..?”  Now, I am not stupid enough to think for a second that she actually intended for me to sleep sleep with her daughters, but that still didnt change the fact that I could not even begin to guess what she actually meant.

Then another woman piped in “So you will sleep with her daughters?”  To which I managed a confident “Um…..shh..ure?”  At this point all the women were smiling and nodding that this was, in fact, an excellent idea.

Beginning to think that I was becoming the victim of some sort of practical joke, I asked “Why would you want me to sleep with your daughters?”

The reply was “To change your face.” 

“To change my face?”

“Yes.  Maybe your nose can become lower.”

“My nose?”

“Yes, it is too high.”

To make a long story short they were joking about softening my very foreign features from an old folk tale.  The belief was that parents sleeping with a new born baby is what passes on facial features from parents to their children.  Much to my dismay this old folk belief had absolutely nothing to do with menage-a-trois.

Teaching in Japan: The Silver Lining of Nova`s collapse

Hubris.

I have been avoiding writing about the Nova scandal but it is no longer impossible to ignore the elephant in the room. For those of you who do not know, Nova is the largest English conversation school (eikaiwa) in Japan. With roughly seven thousand foreign language teachers and staff in its employ and nearly 420,000 students. Wait a minute…sorry, all of that should have been in the past tense.

Nova, the eikaiwa giant, is no more, and no amount of cuteness in its pink bunny logo can save it now.

Over the last few months the company has been disintegrating and now it seems there is no hope of a recovery. Its staff is basically unemployed, many of whom are still owed their salary from August. Nova, a company that advertised on television, in the airport, and was a nearly ubiquitous feature in Japanese train stations, had reached nearly iconic status. Shortly its rotting corpse will be thrown on the trash heap of history and I say good riddance.

I do salute the loyalty of the staff members who have worked diligently for months without pay, but I have to point out that it was pretty dumb to do so, considering how terribly Nova treated their employees. I have a lot more sympathy for the students who, for the most part, pay upfront for expensive year long contracts, and now, for the most part are basically screwed out of their money.

Nova`s main problem was hubris. It controlled nearly 50% of the Eikaiwa market with a widely recognised brand. Apparently it thought it could get away with a number of shenanigans indefinitely. After talking to several (ex) Nova employees it seems that the primary criteria for being hired at Nova was having a pulse. Until recently its core curriculum was apparently centered around a series of texts written in the 1970`s to teach English to Mexican immigrants living in America. Obviously this was a good choice because Spanish is so very similar to Japanese. In addition, students were not tied to any one teacher, making it impossible to tailor a class to the needs of any individual student. To overcome this problem, Nova created a rigid, factory like curriculum that while forcing untalented, uninterested teachers (of whom there were many) to teach at a minimum level, it also forced talented, dedicated, hardworking teachers (of whom there were many) to teach at a minimum level.

It was a great way to build customer loyalty, locking customers into a long, expensive contract (but a relatively cheap cost per lesson) for a barely acceptable product. If they wanted out they were refunded a fraction of their money.

There are also several rumors that long term, experienced and higher paid teachers would not get their contracts renewed in order to be replaced with newer, inexperienced, and lower paid instructors. The fact of the matter is that average full-time salaries have been falling for several years. With the government mandated minimum of 250,000 yen a month that can only mean that experienced teachers are being replaced with new blood. In addition to that, Nova in recent years has been increasingly avoiding the regulated minimum wage by hiring “part-time teachers” who were worked just shy of full time and paid a subsistence level wage. In addition to that Nova teachers were apparently defrauded as standard practice. Moving into a new apartment is quite expensive in Japan, with landlords frequently requiring up to six months rent as a deposit. So Nova rented out apartments and sublet them to their employees. The catch being that they would cram three strangers in a two or one bedroom apartment and charge them (for example) 35,000 yen/month each when the total rent on the apartment could be as low as 70,000 yen/month.

What a great way to build employee loyalty. Seriously. The fact that their staff did not abandon the company like rats from a sinking ship when their first paycheck was held says a lot about more about the character of their staff then it does about the management of the company. Or gullibility. Or both.

So what is the silver lining? Well, not a whole lot to be honest.

There is a chance, however slim, that this could be a good thing for language students in Japan. Nova was the 800 lb gorilla in the Eikaiwa biz. Without Nova, perhaps the industry can evolve from an expensive hobby staffed by tourist-teachers into one that provides meaningful instruction in foreign languages.

The main question is will the now-wizened Japanese consumer seek out and demand qualified and talented instructors, and be willing to pay for a quality product, or will they be duped again by a cute mascot and deceptively low prices?

Learning to pee.

I am not piss-shy.

Honest.

Some guys are, but not me. What I mean by this is that a few guys get all choked up at the urinal. It can be a disconcerting experience standing at a urinal, shoulder to shoulder with a pair of perfect strangers, a crowd of men standing behind you… staring… waiting…. staring…

Well, anyway it never bothered me. It wasn’t something I enjoyed, but it never “stopped the means of production” if you get my drift.

Well, ok. I thought I was not piss-shy until I came to Japan.

You see, when I first came to Japan I started working in elementary schools. Unlike my elementary school of long ago, there are no “teachers bathrooms.” In the schools I worked at, the bathrooms were shared by students and teachers. The bathroom itself is barely divided between boys and girls. I mean, when the school was built, unisex public baths were still common, so why bother to build separate boys and girls sections, right? So on one side of the room is a row of urinals, with a squat toilet at the end. On the other side of the room is a series of stalls for the girls. Since they were built, most but not all of the schools added some sort of divider between the two sides. Of course, unlike American toilets the doors on Japanese stalls go all the way to the floor. (When you are using a squat toilet, those eight inches make all the difference.) There is also no door- the girls have their stalls but the boys side is open for anyone who cares to look, and opposite the entrance, on the far side of the room, a large window is kept open for ventilation.

Mostly, it was no problem, but I found myself avoiding one particular bathroom at one particular school. It was located right next to the office, so teachers and office ladies constantly passed by, who of course, did what everyone does when they pass by a window or open door, and peek in. The window in the bathroom opened onto a small street that had a fair bit of foot traffic. The window in the hallway opposite of the bathroom overlooked the playground. The divider between sections was just a piece of canvas.

So I admit it, when there were a pack of giggling eight year old girls two feet away from me, I got a little trigger-shy.

Eventually, there came a time, however, when its use became unavoidable.

Of course, this was the exact same time that four female teachers began talking right in-front of the urinal half of the bathroom, while children ran by screaming and laughing. But the tank was full and the baby was on the way so what could I do? I angled away as best I could, looked out the window and relaxed, and started to take care of the business.

At which point a woman in her late eighties came tottering by on the street outside. She paused outside of the window, leaning heavily on her walker for rest. Shakily, she turned her head and peered in the window at me. Now given her age, and the fact that public urination is quite legal in Japan, I am sure she wasn’t seeing anything she had not seen before. However, it was quite likely her first time watching a gai-jin, a foreigner changing the oil. But at this time, the flood-gates had been loosed, and I stood there, watching her watching me. If I turned away, I would be exposing myself to my co-workers, and every guy knows that you just cant stop up the waterworks. So she stood there watching for the next fifteen seconds or so, and when I was done I put myself back together, and gave her a little wave, and went about my day.