The Tokyo District Court on Monday rejected a lawsuit filed by Berlitz Japan Inc. that sought damages from union executives and its teachers for waging strikes and causing substantial damage to the company.
Presiding Judge Hiroshi Watanabe sided with the labor union and its workers, saying acts by the defendants “do not comprise any illegality.”
“There is no reason to deny the legitimacy of the strikes,” including their purpose or process, the court ruled.
Berlitz, the plaintiff, filed the lawsuit in December 2008. The language school chain claimed executives of the National Union of General Workers Tokyo Nambu, and affiliate Berlitz General Union Tokyo (Begunto) — particularly five activist, non-Japanese Berlitz teachers — conducted illegal strikes for 11 months beginning in December 2007.
According to the plaintiffs, union activities including coordinated strikes and delay of written notice of strikes “put the company’s existence itself in peril.” The plaintiffs claimed that acts by the defendants affected 3,455 classes during the span and caused some of its students to leave the school.
The company had sought compensation of ¥110 million each from Nambu, Begunto, an executive from each group and the five Berlitz teachers. The strikes involved more than 100 unionized foreign teachers of the chain.
The defendants meanwhile had said their strikes were within their rights, after Berlitz in 2007 rejected their requests, including a demand for a 4.6 percent raise and a bonus payment equal to a month’s pay.
According to the defendants, teachers at Berlitz hadn’t won an across-the-board raise for over 16 years. They claimed the lawsuit violated their right to union activities and collective action.
While similar civil cases have often been settled out of court, the case saw an extended period of negotiations that ultimately ended without an agreement.
Defense lawyer Yukiko Akutsu, who criticized the plaintiffs for causing the case to drag on for over three years, called Monday’s ruling “a complete victory” for her clients.
While touching on the possibility that the plaintiffs may file an appeal, Akutsu told a meeting following the ruling that the court “recognized that each of the strikes was legitimate.”
Eikaiwa
Nonregulars at record 35.2% of workforce
The ratio of nonregular workers in the labor force in 2011 hit a record average high of 35.2 percent, excluding [Iwate, Miyagi and Fukushima] the three prefectures severely affected by the March quake and tsunami, up 0.8 point from 2010, according to data compiled by the Internal Affairs and Communications Ministry.
The average for the year hit a record for the second straight year, the ministry said Monday.
The rise appears to have stemmed from the growing tendency of firms to hire fewer young people as regular workers and rehire veteran workers on a contract basis after their retirement.
By age bracket, the ratio of nonregular workers came to a record 32.6 percent among people aged between 15 and 34, while that among workers aged 55 and over was 51.5 percent, also an all-time high, the ministry said.
Nonregular workers aged between 15 and 34 numbered 1.7 million, up 20,000, it said.
Four years after ‘Nova shock,’ eikaiwa is down but not out
Ask any ordinary person what significance Oct. 26 holds and you might find them struggling for an answer, but for many involved in Japan’s beleaguered English teaching industry, it was the day the nation’s premier operator fell into administration and took much of the rest of the industry with it.
This year, Nova marked its fourth anniversary of operation following restructuring, and while Louis Carlet, executive president of Zenkoku Ippan Tokyo General Union (Tozen), admits it has been a long time since the collapse, he feels that the English conversation school (eikaiwa) industry as a whole “continues to convulse.”
Carlet is no stranger to the Nova saga, having been a spectator to it from the start of the chain’s public troubles in early 2007 and the eventual bankruptcy to Nova’s restructuring by Nagoya-based holding company G.Communication in the following years.
Although the media at the time asked Carlet for his thoughts on a seemingly daily basis, he admits it was difficult to get a historical perspective on what impact Nova’s collapse would have on the industry.
“One thing I did say during several press conferences was that the business model of profits over people does not work in the long run,” he says.
Once the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry became involved in investigating Nova’s business in 2007, the eikaiwa chain seemingly went from a fully operating business to bankruptcy within months.
During the course of Nova’s downward spiral, the atmosphere at branches took a slightly unusual turn as Nova management, or more specifically then President Nozomu Sahashi, tried to allay instructors’ concerns about delayed payments through bizarrely worded faxes, which instead seemed to have the opposite effect.
Thinking back to those faxes, often referred to as “Jesus memos” for the spiritual metaphors and starry-eyed rhetoric Sahashi utilized, Carlet describes them as “creepy” and says they gave employees the feeling Sahashi “was losing it,” which only further lowered the confidence of everyone involved.
Nova finally collapsed under the weight of its debt on Oct. 26, 2007, though while many knew it was coming, Carlet admits he was surprised to hear that the Nova board had conducted a coup d’etat by holding an emergency meeting without Sahashi in order to fire him and immediately apply for court protection from creditors.
Immediately after, the National General Workers Union (NGWU) [sic] found itself thrust into the difficult position of providing support and advice to Nova’s entire foreign workforce, in addition to dealing with a surge in membership in the hundreds.
The labor group managed to organize the instructors into rallies and visits to the Labor Standards Office, as well as holding seminars to explain the complicated system behind the government’s guarantee that 80 percent of unpaid wages would be repaid in the event of bankruptcy and how to apply for unemployment benefits.
“We did a public relations campaign to make sure everyone in Japan knew how bad it was for unpaid teachers, some of whom had trouble getting food,” explains Carlet, who was then deputy secretary general of NGWU’s Tokyo Nambu branch.
The NGWU attempted to assist instructors in this predicament with a highly publicized “Lesson for Food” program, where private students would compensate an instructor for an impromptu language lesson with a meal instead of the normal tuition fee.
While the union’s intentions behind the initiative were noble, Carlet admits in hindsight that it had the “unintended consequence of lowering the private lesson market rate.”
One senior instructor in western Japan, who chose to remain anonymous for this story, has worked continuously with Nova since years before its restructuring, and witnessed the scaling down of Nova firsthand.
“The old Nova had a hierarchy of supervisors who conducted training and evaluations, called titled instructors, and gave day-to-day feedback on teaching performance,” he explains. “They did not always do the job very well, but as G.education hired so few people, there hardly ever seem to be any lesson observations anymore.”
The instructor describes the current Nova management as “extremely poor,” and while it was not especially good at the old Nova, he feels that the people running the branches now are “much worse.”
“There needs to be a proper system for training and supervising teachers, and while the various companies running Nova want the teachers to get more involved in sales, they have no good ideas about what they want the teachers to do,” he says.
While Nova has managed to pull off the massive feat of restructuring, it is clear that the eikaiwa industry has suffered significant contraction following the collapse, with competing language chain Geos going bankrupt in the middle of 2010.
“The economy is bad and young people’s employment is so unstable that most people have little extra time or money to spend learning a foreign language,” Carlet explains.
Looking to the future, Carlet does not foresee things improving drastically for the eikaiwa industry as a whole, but sees some opportunity for smaller operations.
“To recover, the eikaiwa industry would have to overhaul its business model and take language learning seriously as an educational exercise, treat teachers as long-time careerists and, ultimately, charge more,” he says.
Fear for jobs ignites “English crisis” in Japan
It’s eight in the morning in a Tokyo office building, and a dozen middle-aged Japanese businessmen sit inside small booths, sweating as they try to talk English to the instructors in front of them.
“I hope my wife will understand my hobby,” one 40-something man says, opening his mouth widely around the English words.
He is one of legions of Japanese businessmen, or “salarymen,” struggling with a language they thought they had left behind them in school as fears mount that the growing push by Japanese companies into overseas business will mean a dark future for them without usable English.
This is especially true these days, with the strong yen and a lagging domestic market prompting more firms to look overseas for business opportunities essential for their bottom lines.
“I had a business trip to Amsterdam last year and that really was tough. My boss spoke no English, and I had to speak English for the first time in 10 years,” said Masahide Tachibana, a 39-year-old software developer.
Tachibana now gets up at 5:00 a.m. to take morning lessons at a central Tokyo branch of Gaba, an English language school.
“I’ve always wanted to brush up my English and that business trip ignited my aspirations,” said Tachibana, as around him other businessmen and women pack up and hurry to work after their 45-minute, one-on-one lessons.
Japan, despite being the world’s third-largest economy and a major export powerhouse, is known for its poor English-speaking ability even though six years of study are required in middle and high school.
The country’s average score on the TOEFL iBT, a computer-based test of English as a foreign language, in 2010 ranked 27th among 30 Asian countries, below Mongolia and Turkmenistan.
Only 9 percent of 1,156 white-collar workers surveyed by Recruit Agent, a recruiting firm, claim to be able to communicate in English. Many respondents evaluated their speaking and listening aptitude as “Barely.”
But things are starting to change, prompted by a growing sense of urgency about employment.
NO ENGLISH, NO JOBS?
The first push came from online retailer Rakuten’s 2010 decision to make English their official language. Fast Retailing, the operator of the Uniqlo apparel chain, also wants to make English its official language by 2012 and test its employees for proficiency.
“Rakuten’s decision triggered a shock-wave that’s extended to many other companies, especially manufacturers, because they too are under pressure to expand outside a shrinking home market,” said Yuriko Tsurumaki, a Recruit Agent spokeswoman.
“Not all Japanese firms have businesses overseas for the time being but people are seeing possibilities and sharing a sense of crisis (about English).”
Now nearly half of Japanese companies planning new hiring require applicants to be “business English users” – a big rise from 16 percent in July 2009, she said.
Highlighting fears among businessmen with poor English, a number of companies, including chip maker Elpida Memory and Murata Manufacturing Co, a maker of parts used in mobile phones and computers, are shifting some production outside Japan to cope with a currency near record highs.
The surging yen is also encouraging Japanese firms to acquire businesses overseas to build more revenue pillars, with trading house Itochu buying Britain’s tire seller Kwik Fit for $1 billion.
As a result, Japan’s foreign language education market is growing, with learners more than willing to fork out plenty of money on lessons, DVDs or e-learning.
It rose 1.6 percent to $9.8 billion in 2010 from a year earlier, said Yano Institute of Research, and is set to grow another 1.8 percent this year, making it a rare bright spot amid lagging Japanese private consumption.
“This is just the start of Japan’s real globalization. Everyone is feeling that they’ll see a no-English-no-job situation,” Gaba‘s president Kenji Kamiyama told Reuters in a recent interview.
Thanks to avid English learners, Gaba says it has almost achieved its student number target for the year and predicts the upbeat trend will likely last for a while. Gaba says that on average, a student spends about 50,000 yen ($654) a month — against an average 36,500 yen allowance for Japanese businesspeople.
“The English crisis shows the rapidly changing environment Japanese firms face. Most Japanese businessmen, for a long time, avoided an English-speaking environment,” Gaba’s Kamiyama said.
“But they now know that they can’t stay that way… It’s been a real kick in the pants for them.”
http://old.news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20110922/lf_nm_life/us_japan_english
Japan’s ratio of education spending to GDP lowest among OECD nations
Japan’s expenditure on education as a percentage of gross domestic product in 2008 remained the lowest among 31 member countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the organization said in a report released Tuesday.
Japan’s ratio of educational expenditure to GDP in 2008 stood at 3.3 percent, the lowest among the 31 of the OECD’s 34 members with comparable data. Japan’s ratio was also the lowest in 2005 and 2007, and the second lowest in 2004 and 2006 in the annual OECD studies.
Meanwhile, private spending on education as a proportion of total educational expenditure stood at 33.6 percent in Japan, the third highest among 28 countries with comparable data, following Chile at 41.4 percent and South Korea at 40.4 percent.
The average number of students per class at Japanese elementary schools in 2009 stood at 28.0, compared with the average of 21.4 for 25 countries with comparable data. The average class size at junior high schools was 33.0, the second largest class size among the 25 countries, following South Korea at 35.1, the OECD said.
Besides efforts by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology to reduce class sizes, the OECD report pointed out that “other factors that influence the quality of education need to be taken into account,” such as improving teachers’ salaries and working conditions in Japan.
http://mdn.mainichi.jp/mdnnews/news/20110914p2g00m0dm003000c.html
Expats in Japan face hard choices
Oregonians living in Japan like me have taken a hard look at our futures since the March 11 earthquake, tsunami and the unfolding nuclear and economic crises. Radiation leaks, contaminated crops and water, plutonium released into the air and ocean, have made expats in Japan question whether to stay or head back home, especially in the face of pressure from family and loved ones.
Relatively few Americans live in Japan, fewer still from Oregon. Through work, I’ve become friends with a few Oregonians who share the same circumstances and tough choices.
I’m from Portland, 42, and live in Inuyama. I’ve been in Japan for 10 years, mostly teaching English, but also freelancing as a photographer, writer and video producer.
My two friends and I have a number of things in common. We enjoyed our lives in Oregon, but things weren’t panning out as well as we had hoped and we sought a new adventure, which America-friendly Japan provided. Living here has been a series of trade-offs, exchanging one set of headaches and concerns for different ones.
The question is, in the face of health concerns and financial hardship, is it time to trade them back again?
Stay or go?
Keary Doyle of Florence, 57, lives by himself in the rural town of Yamagata. He has been in Japan since 2000, and while he’s mulled a return home in recent years, the unemployment rate stops him. He worked as a logger and in the mills, but those jobs dried up.
“I don’t see the prospects of me going back being very economically viable,” he says.
Even though Japan’s job market is challenging as well, there are always teaching positions for native English speakers like Doyle. But going back to America expecting to teach English, especially without a college degree in education, is almost impossible. Like me, he wonders, “If I went back, what would I do for work?”
Keary lives approximately 300 miles from the reactors, a relatively safe distance, but it’s difficult to feel at ease. Simply because the nuclear crisis isn’t in the daily headlines doesn’t mean the radiation danger is any less real for those living near it.
Jeff Kreuger of Gladstone, 34, has greater reason to worry. He lives in Nagano prefecture, 200 miles from the reactors, and has a wife and 1-year-old daughter.
“A lot of family and friends were saying ‘Get out of there quick,'” he says about the beginning of the crisis. “I wanted solid information on how dangerous it was here in Nagano.”
He found a Japanese website with real-time monitoring of radiation and another showing winds blowing airborne radiation to sea.
“I haven’t found evidence yet that would lead me to think we should evacuate,” he says. “And if we did go to Oregon, how would we live? Would I be able to find a job and support my family?”
He wonders if things would pan out because when he returned to Oregon in 2004, before he was married, he only managed to get a part-time job at a coffee shop, which came without health care and other benefits.
“For me, it was a hardscrabble existence,” he says. “I was living from paycheck to paycheck,” and found it difficult to pay for rent, food, car repairs and general living expenses.
When his previous employer in Nagano wanted him back to continue teaching English at the junior high school, tempting him with a rent-free apartment, car and no taxes on his generous salary, the decision was easy. Three years later, he married his Japanese girlfriend, Miho.
Whether it’s career, love life or vacation and employment benefits, we all have far greater potential to have those things here than in Oregon, which has brought us all to the same conclusion: The relatively minimal danger here while the disaster is brought under control, compounded by the grim economic forecast, is far less risky than a permanent move back to Oregon in the foreseeable future.
In the meantime, we all pine for the Northwest: the absence of sweltering summer humidity and the friendliness of everybody everywhere. Instead, we visit our loved ones and friends as often as we can.
We have to settle for the sight of the Cascade Range when flying in, the Columbia River and all those green trees and grass, and wide open spaces.
http://www.oregonlive.com/living/index.ssf/2011/08/expats_in_japan_face_hard_choi.html
Nichii Gakkan Company to Launch Takeover Bid for Shares of Gaba Corporation
Nichii Gakkan Company announced that it has decided to launch a takeover bid for shares of Gaba Corporation. Nichii Gakkan Company intends to purchase 50,497 shares of Gaba Corporation at the price of JPY 200,000 per share during the period from August 8, 2011 to September 21, 2011. If Nichii Gakkan Company purchased as many shares of Gaba Corporation, it will hold 100% voting rights in Gaba Corporation. However, if Nichii Gakkan Company were not able to purchase at least 26,390 shares of Corporation, the takeover bid will be cancelled. Based on the result of the takeover bid, Gaba Corporation may be delisted from the Tokyo Stock Exchange.
http://uk.reuters.com/business/quotes/2133.T/key-developments/article/2378201
Nichii Gakkan To Launch Tender Offer For Gaba
Nichii Gakkan Co. said Friday it will begin a tender offer to purchase shares of Gaba Corp., an operator of English-language conversation classes, in a move to bolster its education business.
Nichii plans to spend up to 10 billion yen to make Gaba a wholly owned subsidiary.
The offer price is 200,000 yen per share, a 53% premium over Friday’s close.
Gaba operates classes at 36 locations in the nation’s three major metropolitan areas. The bulk of its students are corporate employees. The firm posted 7.75 billion yen in sales and 596 million yen in net profit for the year ended December 2010.
Even though [Nichii’s] offerings have expanded beyond its mainstay preparatory courses for medical and nursing licenses, it is still struggling. The firm expects the Gaba brand to help it win contracts for corporate English training and to expand its online offerings.
Cashing in on the time change
Restaurants, retailers and language schools have been rolling out business strategies and special offers aimed at attracting people whose workplaces have introduced in-house daylight saving time programs.
Industries left short-handed after foreign workers flee Japan following nuke accident
Tens of thousands of worried foreign workers left Japan shortly after a crisis at the nuclear power plant that was crippled by the March 11 earthquake and tsunami, causing serious labor shortages in some industries.