In April 2007, the Supreme Court ruled the way the company calculated its cancellation policies was illegal and ordered Nova Corp. to repay about ¥310,000 to a Tokyo man who received no refund when he canceled his contract.
Faced with mounting debts, Sahashi in July 2007 allegedly diverted nearly ¥320 million from an employment benefit fund to the affiliate’s account.
The money was then supposedly used to reimburse students who had canceled their contracts. Nova officially declared bankruptcy in October 2007 and much of its operation was taken over by Nagoya-based G.Communications.
Sahashi argued he had the employees’ welfare in mind when he used the funds to pay the cancellation fees.
“Use of the money is not a violation of the funds’ purpose. The defendant thought it was money in an account with his name to be used for the welfare of the employees,” Sahashi’s lawyers said in a statement to the court. “Unless the cancellation fees were paid, the company was facing bankruptcy. Because there were no other funds, the money was used to avoid this worst possible case, and to maintain a minimal (amount) of welfare for the employees.”
Sahashi faces not only a lawsuit over the diversion of the employee benefit funds but also a suit by former students seeking ¥16 million in damages.
An attempt by [NUGW Tokyo Nambu sister union] the Osaka-based General Union, which represents many ex-Nova employees, to get prosecutors to indict Sahashi for nonpayment of wages failed last year. But in March, after the union pushed the local labor bureau to get prosecutors to probe their decision, auditors for the prosecutor’s office ruled the initial decision not to charge Sahashi was unjust.
The union hopes Sahashi will be tried separately for nonpayment of wages to 5,000 dismissed employees.
TozenAdmin
Ex-Nova president pleads not guilty
According to the indictment, in July 2007, Sahashi conspired with a 50-year-old Nova executive in charge of finance to embezzle the reserve funds of a mutual aid organization for Nova Group employees chaired by Sahashi.
The money was transferred to a bank account of an affiliate company.
The prosecutors said that on the night before the transfer was made, Sahashi had convinced the executive, who was reluctant to take part in the scheme, that repaying the students was a necessity and urged him to spend as much money as possible.
The issue that dares not speak its name
In Japanese, “racial discrimination” is jinshu sabetsu. That is the established term used in official translations of international treaties (such as the United Nations Convention on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, or CERD) that Japan has signed up to.
However, the Japanese media won’t couch the discussion in these terms. This was visible during the nationwide debate generated by the Otaru onsen case (1999-2005), where public bathhouses refused entry to customers because they didn’t “look Japanese.” If you read the oodles of non-tabloid articles on this case, you’ll see the debate was conducted in milder, misleading language.
For example, it was rendered in terms of gaikokujin sabetsu (discrimination against foreigners). But that’s not the same thing. The people being discriminated against were not all foreign (ahem).
Or else it was depicted as gaiken sabetsu (discrimination by physical appearance). But that’s not “race,” either. Nor is “physical appearance” specifically covered by the CERD.
This term particularly derails the debate. It actually generates sympathy for people afraid of how others look.
Nova founder faces trial
The founder of Japan’s failed language school chain Nova went on trial on Monday charged with embezzlement over a scandal that left thousands of foreign teachers without jobs.
Nova, whose schools were once ubiquitous across Japanese cities, filed for bankruptcy protection in 2007 after the government ordered it to halt part of its operations over insufficient refunds for students.
Founder Nozomu Sahashi was then accused of siphoning off 320 million yen (S$4.8 million) from a benefits fund set up through employee contributions.
At his first court hearing, Sahashi, 57, admitted to using the funds but only said: ‘I cannot make a judgement on whether it should be considered embezzlement.’
His defence lawyer, according to a report by Jiji Press, said Sahashi had ‘no intention of embezzling money’ and had spent more than 1.1 billion yen of his private money to run the company.
Before its collapse, Nova had an estimated 400,000 students and 6,000 employees, some 4,500 of them foreigners. Many teachers were young people looking to spend a few years in Japan.
Some foreign teachers even offered to give lessons for food after Nova’s collapse left them unemployed in one of the world’s most expensive countries.
Sahashi established Nova in 1981, tapping into a Japanese passion for language study by setting up schools with trademark blue-and-yellow signs across major cities.
http://www.straitstimes.com/Breaking%2BNews/Asia/Story/STIStory_384477.html
Ex-Nova president admits to embezzling, but counsel pleads not guilty
The former president of English conversation school operator Nova Corp. admitted to embezzling employment benefit funds shortly before the company went bankrupt at his first court hearing Monday at the Osaka District Court.
But defense counsel for Nozomu Sahashi, 57, claimed his actions were in the interest of the employees and do not constitute the crime of professional embezzlement, pleading not guilty.
“It cannot be judged whether it is embezzlement or not,” Sahashi said.
According to the indictment, Sahashi diverted about 320 million yen from an employment benefit fund on July 20, 2007, transferring the money to the bank account of an affiliate company.
He is believed to have used it to reimburse tuition fees to those who canceled their contracts for language lessons.
“I apologize for causing students and employees great trouble,” Sahashi said at the beginning of the hearing.
Nova went bust in October 2007, leaving thousands of employees jobless and its students without refunds.
Nagoya-based G.communication Co. took over some of Nova’s operations in November that year.
Separate from the criminal case, former Nova students filed a lawsuit at the Osaka District Court seeking a total of 16 million yen in damages from Sahashi, the former management team and the audit corporation over their prepaid lesson fees.
Sahashi launched English conversation classes in Osaka in 1981 and set up Nova in 1990. His venture grew into Japan’s largest chain of English schools, with some 480,000 people taking its language lessons at its peak, before going bankrupt.
http://www.pddnet.com/news-ap-lead-ex-nova-president-admits-to-embezzling-but–053109/
Ex-NOVA president admits diverting funds but says it wasn’t embezzlement
[Former Nova President Nozomu] Sahashi is under indictment on charges of embezzlement in the conduct of business for transferring 320 million yen from the account of the employees’ mutual assistance association into another account in July 2007, exchanging the money for a check and placing the funds in an affiliate’s account.
A prosecutor said in the opening statement that Sahashi embezzled the funds because NOVA was pinched for money. “The defendant committed the crime after his firm became hard-pressed for cash and had difficulties repaying tuition fees to students who cancelled their contracts.”
The prosecutor said that on July 19, 2007, the day before the alleged crime, Sahashi instructed an accountant in the firm to use money from the association to refund tuition fees.
The accountant told him that the money in the association cannot be used that way. However, Sahashi said, “I know that, but we have no choice because we have no other funds,” according to the opening statement.
Moreover, apart from the 320 million yen, prosecutors accuse Sahashi of misappropriating approximately 30 million yen from the mutual assistance association between March 2004 and March 2007.
http://mdn.mainichi.jp/mdnnews/national/news/20090601p2a00m0na010000c.html
Immigration bills threaten rights of foreigners: critics
Representatives of municipalities and human rights groups voiced their opposition Thursday to government-sponsored immigration bills they say will lead to violations of foreigners’ rights and excessive control over them.
The proposed bills would issue new “zairyu” (residency) cards to replace their alien registration cards. Failure to carry the cards or report any changes in status could lead to a fine of up to ¥200,000, and failure to comply within three months could lead to one’s visa being canceled.
Alien registration is currently handled by local ward offices, but the new bills would hand responsibility for that task — and any records collected — to the Justice Ministry.
Hiroko Uehara, the former mayor of the city of Kunitachi in western Tokyo, refused to connect the municipality’s resident registry network to the nationwide Juki Net network in 2002 to protect residents’ privacy. She warned that transferring the management of alien registration from municipalities to immigration offices would reduce the quality of service for foreign residents.
“Municipalities have so far made an effort to provide, at their own discretion, services to foreign residents,” Uehara told a gathering in Tokyo. “But if immigration takes control of registration, all that effort will be lost,” she said.
5,631 temps killed, injured in work accidents in 2008
A total of 5,631 dispatch workers were killed or injured in work-related accidents in 2008, many of them inexperienced workers in the manufacturing industry, according to a Health, Labor and Welfare Ministry report.
While the figure is 254 lower than in 2007, it is still high–more than eight times the number injured or killed in 2004, when a ban on dispatching workers to the manufacturing industry was lifted.
The manufacturing industry accounted for 64.8 percent of cases–62.9 percent of whom were workers with less than one year’s experience at the companies in question.
Proposed foreigner card protested
Opponents of change to immigration law fear loss of privacy, other human rights violations
More than 200 people [including former members of the National Union of General Workers Tokyo Nambu] rallied in Tokyo’s Shinbashi district Sunday to protest government-sponsored immigration bills they claim would violate the privacy of foreign residents and strengthen government control over them.
The protesters say the proposed system would allow the government to punish non-Japanese who fail to properly report their personal information, and could even make it possible for immigration authorities to arbitrarily revoke their visas.
IC you: bugging the alien
New gaijin cards could allow police to remotely track foreigners
When the Japanese government first issued alien registration cards (aka gaijin cards) in 1952, it had one basic aim in mind: to track “foreigners” (at that time, mostly Korean and Taiwanese stripped of Japanese colonial citizenship) who decided to stay in postwar Japan.
Gaijin cards put foreigners in their place: Registry is from age 16, so from a young age they were psychologically alienated from the rest of Japanese society. So what if they were born and acculturated here over many generations? Still foreigners, full stop.
Even today, when emigrant non-Japanese far outnumber the native-born, the government tends to see them all less as residents, more as something untrustworthy to police and control. Noncitizens are not properly listed on residency registries. Moreover, only foreigners must carry personal information (name and address, personal particulars, duration of visa status, photo, and — for a time — fingerprints) at all times. Gaijin cards must also be available for public inspection under threat of arrest, one year in jail and ¥200,000 in fines.
However, the Diet is considering a bill abolishing those gaijin cards.
Sounds great at first: Under the proposed revisions, non-Japanese would be registered properly with residency certificates (juminhyo). Maximum visa durations would increase from three years to five. ID cards would be revamped. Drafters claim this will “protect” (hogo) foreigners, making their access to social services more “convenient.”
However, read the fine print. The government is in fact creating a system to police foreigners more tightly than ever.