Nova

TEACHING English in Japan: a working holiday in a truly strange and different country (to those of us not Japanese); getting paid for talking your own language in a classroom; spare time and funds for culture in Kyoto, night-clubbing in Shinjuku, deep powder snow around Nagano. Or whatever.

It seems so cool and out-there — at least before Nova Corp went belly-up on October 26 — that it’s faintly surprising there hasn’t been a big travellers’ novel out of it, or a quirky movie.

The reality is more raw, though. An artist that The Australian spoke to, but who asked not to be identified, came to work while gathering material and studying Japanese techniques but left sick and angry, he says, because of his experiences as a Nova English instructor.

Sydneysider Natasha Steele arrived almost 10 months ago, planning on a year’s stay. One of 900-odd Australians aboard when Nova went down, she was a short-termer, but no dilettante.

“I was a bit discontented (in Australia), I wanted to do something different, more fulfilling, and before I came here I took the CELTAC (Cambridge English Language Teaching of Adults Certificate); that alone cost me $3000,” says the 26-year-old marine science and management graduate.

“I wanted to make a difference — if Japanese people wanted to learn English, then I wanted to help them the best I could to do that.”

Steele was broke after university and now she’s broke again. She’s making the best of her remaining stay here by campaigning for just treatment of about 4000 foreign instructors and 2000 Japanese staff stranded by the collapse. “I just don’t want to end up regretting my time here.”

Nor does Bob Tench, an Englishman who taught at a Nova school in Shinjuku and who now heads the National Union of General Workers’ Nova division. His life is here; he came in 1994 and recently married a local woman.

Tench claims that once he became active in the union, in response to worsening work conditions, Nova management retaliated with tougher teaching schedules and the annual threat of losing his job and visa: all the instructors are on one-year contracts.

Another Nova technique was to extract advance-paid tuition fees; amounts for the contracts valid over three years varied between Y600,000 and Y900,000 (about $5740 to $8570) according to a recent Ministry of Economy Trade Industry report.

More than 300,000 adult students and parents were caught short by the collapse.

Those people are now variously reported to be owed between Y40 and Y70 billion. The court-appointed administrators refused to comment. G.communications, a small operator, has undertaken to rehabilitate part of the business but won’t pick up the fees liability.

The instructors’ view of the proposal is summed up by a posting on the website LetsJapan.org. “Jobs or the same old shit?”

There are no verifiable figures available, but Kyodo news agency, quoting “sources”, claims that in the event of a full liquidation, the final deficiency could be Y98.5 billion.

The Japan Association for the Promotion of Foreign Language, claiming to represent most of the substantial language schools (but not Nova, which till recently constituted about half the total industry) advises members to charge no more than a year in advance. The Australian randomly checked three; they were charging advance fees for courses between 15 and 27 months. Nozomu Sahashi, the 56-year-old former president, founded Nova in 1981 with Anders Lundqvist, a Swede who became education director.

He proceeded to revolutionise commercial language business here.

As well as classrooms and face-to-face tuition, Nova offered remote teaching, flexible hours, aggressive price discounting and in recent years its branches mushroomed crazily.

It slogan was ekimae ryuugakku, “study overseas, in front of (every) train station”.

Earlier this year, there were 914 branches, though the number by October had plunged to 670.

Nova’s promotional spending was also phenomenal. The pink Nova-Usagi (Nova Bunny) became one of this brand-obsessed nation’s most recognisable commercial symbols. METI estimates 1.1 million people pay fees for English lessons annually, mostly, in effect, for remedial teaching.

Nova’s foreigners were not usually teachers per se, but graduates of many types on working holidays, paying off student loans, or in search of Japanese experiences. They were, relatively speaking, cheap labour and Nova cut corners to make them cheaper.

Though inevitably some decided to settle in Japan, most looked to stay a year or so. Short-stayers were generally less concerned than permanents like Tench about conditions such as statutory social insurance (which Nova was reluctant to pay, unless to an associated company that has also now gone under).

The standard pre-tax salary recently for foreign instructors was Y250,000 (about $2350 monthly), less Y66,000 for a rented, shared apartment (teachers could make their own arrangements but were encouraged to use housing organised by Nova).

Discipline of Japanese and foreign staff was strictly enforced and associations between teachers and students beyond the classroom were prohibited.

“They were advertising us as the attraction and then forbidding us to mix socially,” says a former instructor. “I accept that some foreigners’ behaviour left plenty to be desired, but when we’d go out for a meal or a drink, mostly it was the students asking to join us.”

Unionism also was discouraged by Nova management — though not overtly, because that’s against the law — and teachers who did join up say they were singled out for tougher schedules and sometimes sent to more distant branches.

High turnover was sustained by a big, continuous recruitment effort: Nova had offices for that purpose in Australia, the US, Canada and Britain and New Zealand. In Australia, the Brisbane office’s efforts were supplemented by a Melbourne-based company, Australia Asia Centre for Education Exchange (AACE), which says it advised its fresh recruits to postpone or cancel departures once Nova began delaying instructors’ pay. AACE ended the relationship on October 1.

But Nova offices continued signing and sending people to the end. “The most shocking thing to me was they were still recruiting in Canada in the last weeks when they knew they couldn’t pay them,” said a Canadian official.

But the worm was in the apple well before then and the real problem was students, rather than teachers becoming leery of Nova.

For years, complaints had been mounting, mainly from people wanting to discontinue lessons but finding refunds extremely difficult to obtain. “English lessons are the kind of things people change their mind about, especially if they’ve bought three years’ worth,” says a financier who has studied the operation.

Nova Bunny notwithstanding, the brand was getting grubby and Nova’s market share fell from 51 to 47 per cent in 2005 and to 45 per cent last year — all amid the huge branch expansion.

As complaints mounted, shinpan credit companies — used by about 20 per cent of students to raise their up-front fees — started refusing to fund Nova contracts. In April the Supreme Court ruled Nova refund restrictions illegal and in June METI punished the company for lying in some promotions by closing off some courses to new students for six months.

Sahashi had run the business side of Nova almost manically single-handed, while Lundqvist managed the education operations, and suddenly Nova was being hit by blow after blow. Customers were peeling away and not being replaced so that by September, on one informed estimate, Nova was getting in Y1 for every Y4 walking out the door.

Reports documenting the company’s rise during the 1980s and 1990s had depicted the Nova crowd as youthfully innovative in their approach. A more forthcoming Sahashi then said he started the business because foreign backpackers were always sleeping on his floor. In the early days “the school was in a constant buzz and gave off a massive amount of energy”.

The picture gradually darkened, however. Sahashi’s private life and intra-office relationships were reported to have been hectic and the Nova image now fixed in the public mind is the ex-president’s office-cum-playhouse in Osaka.

More than 300 square metres, it was draped in scarlet velvet and scattered with stuffed Nova Bunnies. There was a traditional Japanese tea-room and the less-traditional double bed.

A week after the wrecked group went into administration, news crews were led tut-tutting through these quarters and that led all the commercial TV news that night.

Sahashi was annoyed that the administrators would use the executive floor to misrepresent “him using the company to benefit himself”. At least that’s what his lawyers said. Sahashi has refused to reveal himself since July, communicating with increasingly desperate staff by faxes, promising wages that arrived late and then not at all.

His lawyers asserted the former president’s chambers served as “as a model home office to demonstrate the advantages of such a space”. But Sahashi had a similar facility in Tokyo. It was “like a weird guy’s idea of a love hotel” said a recent visitor.

Lundqvist and his co-directors brought the farrago to an end, apparently losing faith in Sahashi’s claims he could raise Y4 billion — and then, soon, Y6 billion — to keep the show rolling. In his absence on October 25, they voted Sahashi out and next morning filed for administration.

The possibility of Lundqvist emerging in charge of a restructured Nova didn’t fill the teachers with joy. “He has been intimately involved in the way Nova has been run from the beginning,” says Tench. “He didn’t have perhaps the same trappings as president Sahashi — the Playboy Penthouse — but he knew everything that was going on so, so if the company acted improperly, he was part and parcel of that.”

Another former long-term teacher and unionist, Tristan Sime, says foreigners who rose under Lundqvist from teaching to supervisory positions were “cult-like” in their devotion to the company’s methods.

Lundqvist’s response? “I am sorry but I can’t talk to you now and I don’t have any comments for you, anyway. I will never be able to talk to you. Goodbye.”

A charming and forthright man, obviously, but could you trust him with your job?

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,22812113-23850,00.html

With Monday marking one month since English-language school operator Nova Corp. filed for court protection, there is still no prospect of students receiving refunds on tuition fees and many Nova employees have chosen to leave their jobs.

G.communication Co., a Nagoya-based language-school operator, has taken over Nova operations and resumed offering lessons at 25 branches since Nov. 14, including the Kurokawa branch in Nagoya, which on Nov. 16 was the first to reopen.

The Hyogo-Koshien branch in Nishinomiya, Hyogo Prefecture, on Sunday became the first to resume operations in the Kansai region, where the company was headquartered. Seven students attended lessons on the day.

A foreign instructor at the branch said, “I’m so glad we could start lessons again.”

One student said: “Lessons resumed sooner than I expected, so I’m relieved. But I hope the branch closest to my home, which I used to go to, will reopen soon.”

Four branches in Tokyo–including Akabane in Kita Ward and Katsushika-Koiwa in Edogawa Ward–will be shortly reopened.

G.communication plans to reopen about 80 branches by the end of December at the earliest. The firm hopes that within six months to one year from now, lessons will be offered at 200 branches.

Among about 4,900 Japanese employees and foreign instructors that worked for Nova, more than half are likely to be rehired by G.communication. About 70 percent of foreign instructors, many of whom have been forced into poverty due to Nova’s failure to pay their wages, are likely to accept job offers from G.communication.

“Many students were hard workers and I’m attached to them,” a 50-year-old Australian man who used to work at the Tennoji branch in Osaka said.

However, about half of Japanese employees, including executives of key departments, are expected to refuse G.communication’s offer and quit Nova.

G.communication is said to have used aggressive merger and acquisition techniques to expand its business. Former Nova President Nozomu Sahashi was known for his autocratic management style.

One former Nova executive who has refused the job offer from G.communication said, “[G.communication’s business style] reminds me of [Sahashi].”

When Nova filed for court protection, it had about 300,000 students. Many of them do not know whether they will be able to continue lessons.

Students can continue lessons, redeeming prepaid tuition points, if they pay an additional 25 percent of the standard tuition fee. However, not all 670 branches will be reopened.

Nova became hugely popular due to the convenient locations of its branches, advertised by the firm as offering “ekimae ryugaku” (studying near your train station). However, G.communication Chairman and President Masaki Inayoshi said, “We’ll maintain the ‘ekimae’ style, but we won’t be so picky about prime locations.”

Some students have claimed they will be unable continue lessons if branch locations are not as convenient as they were, and the number of students could drop depending on the locations of reopened branches.

In addition, it is unclear whether G.communication has the resources to manage branches across the nation.

Nova shares closed at 1 yen on the Jasdaq stock market Monday–the last day of Nova stock dealing–dropping from 2 yen at Thursday’s close.

The stock was valued at 6,610 yen just after it went public in November 1996, but from mid-September this year, when the firm was found to have delayed wage payments to its staff, the price hovered at about 50 yen.

http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/dy/national/20071127TDY01301.htm

Ousted NOVA Corp. President Nozomu Sahashi told the Sunday Mainichi in an exclusive interview — the first he has given since the collapse of the English conversation chain — that “before I apologize to everybody, I want to get NOVA back on its feet.”

Sahashi, 56, vanished from public view as NOVA struggled throughout the summer and early autumn months, but despite being accused of mixing his private and public lives too much, he takes a strong stance on his handling of the company.

“I’m being set up as the bad guy,” he says. “I didn’t take a single day off from April as I went around busting my guts to try and get NOVA to rebuild under its own steam. I stopped taking a wage myself from July. If what’s going on now hadn’t happened, I thought I would have been able to get 10 billion yen to get the company back on track. (After I was sacked), there was this sudden liberation from the difficulties of trying to collect money and my mind is still a blur. I still haven’t thought about what I’m going to do from now.”

While Sahashi occasionally smiles during interviews with Sunday Mainichi reporters, most of the time his face remained stern.

Sahashi spoke during sessions conducted at a Tokyo hotel on Nov. 14 and 15. We asked Sahashi if we could take photos, but he steadfastly refused, saying, “I don’t know what face I should put on before the camera.”

Sahashi stood at the helm as the dominant president of NOVA before he was axed on Oct. 26, the same day the company filed for court protection from creditors. He vanished from public view ever since. He did not show himself to the roughly 300,000 NOVA students and employees and publicly was criticized for an “irresponsible” attitude. Receivers have strongly blasted his management and are considering pressing charges of breach of trust against him.

On Nov. 5, Sahashi filed a report with the Osaka District Court in which he denied many of the allegations about him that have been floating in the media in recent weeks. But the 200 minutes he spent with Mainichi reporters represented the first time he had confronted the media since NOVA’s collapse.

Sahashi was particularly vehement in denying claims that he had turned NOVA’s President’s Office into an opulent “secret hideaway.”

The hideaway was a Japanese-style room about the size of 8 tatami mats (around 24 square meters), contained a Jacuzzi and double bed. Receivers said they opened the room to the media because they wanted to show the world how much Sahashi was using the company as his private property.

“The double bed wasn’t for private use, but used as a guest room for visiting VIPs. It was mainly for guests from overseas. Some people are saying it was suspicious because the bed had two pillows, but hotel beds nowadays all have two pillows. This wasn’t the President’s Office. Within the company, we used to call it the ‘Business Center,’ ” Sahashi says.

Sahashi also denies claims that he had several lovers and that he had been involved with many of the women he employed.

“We don’t have secretaries in our company. Considering 80 percent of employees are women, there would be uproar if I ever became involved with a member of staff. As for the reports that I appointed former hostesses as secretaries, all I can say is that I don’t go to the kind of places where hostesses work. There couldn’t be a type further from the clubs of Ginza or Shinchi than me,” Sahashi said.

Sahashi becomes furious when discussion shifts to the G.education group that has bought out NOVA.

“I can’t get it out of my mind that what happened was a planned raid,” he said, each word hissed out with seething anger as he goes on to give his side of NOVA’s collapse.

NOVA’s fall was sparked by a February inspection of the company by the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) following a spate of troubles rising out of the conversation school chain’s contracts with students. NOVA had escalated rapidly, setting up too many schools to be able to provide enough teachers and making it difficult for students to get classes they had been promised. NOVA’s situation worsened in June when METI said there had been 18 cases where the company had acted illegally and banned it from carrying out some of what had been its standard business practices. The ban led to a rush of students leaving the school and made NOVA’s fund-raising a more difficult proposition than ever.

In April last year, Sahashi was ordered to appear before the Osaka Consumer Center to explain how his company planned to avoid further contract problems with students. At the time, Sahashi turned up to a meeting with Osaka Mayor Junichi Seki accompanied by Liberal Democratic Party House of Representatives member Yasuhide Nakayama, which has led to media claims that the ex-NOVA boss was trying to use political strong-arming to influence his fate.

“We never applied any pressure on the mayor. How much influence do you think a two-time Diet member can peddle? Nakayama is my friend and I haven’t made any political donations to him. All we did was pay a courtesy visit to the mayor,” Sahashi says.

Sahashi explains what he did as NOVA was crumbling around him. He says he foresaw NOVA’s revival coming through merging his schools to cut costs and securing funds of 10 billion yen.

“With the merging of schools, I had been negotiating with a conference room rental company about taking them over with no further refurbishment and we were at the stage where we were talking concrete details. I forecast that shutting down schools would have brought in about 3 billion yen or 4 billion yen from returned deposits. My plan was to rationalize 200 to 300 schools from late October to November,” Sahashi says. “As for fund acquisition, I had set up a share warrant where 200 million shares would be issued to two fund companies and the plan was to have 3 billion yen at first in cash by Oct. 26. While searching for capital, I looked at 20 to 30 funds before finally settling on two investment companies based in the British Virgin Islands. I had a plan to increase capital by about 7 billion yen.”

Sahashi is also reported to have been involved with major share market speculator Haruo Nishida, who has been charged by the Osaka District Public Prosecutors Office for trying to manipulate the market. A brokerage industry insider explains.

“Sahashi was in a hurry to get money and saw many assets eaten up by anti-social forces. There are 8 million shares Sahashi had in NOVA that remain unaccounted for and this probably explains why his name has come up (with Nishida). There’s no doubt there was some murky ground in his plans to raise money. The link between Sahashi and Nishida, however, is a mystery,” the insider says.

Sahashi completely denies any relationship with Nishida.

“I don’t know him at all. I checked with the funds and they said he was a complete stranger,” Sahashi says.

Incidentally, Sahashi owned 48 million NOVA shares, or about 72 percent of the entire company. He says he gave an investment consultant 22 million shares from late July to mid-August to use them to try and raise money. He says the allegedly missing 8 million shares arose from this.

“I have no idea who owns them now. They weren’t returned to me by the end of September as promised and the investment consultant said they would be back by the end of October. The shares have been sold for sure, so my only option is to press charges. I realize it’s a bit late now to have them give back worthless shares, but unless I do that there’s no way I can prove my innocence,” Sahashi says.

Sahashi is also furious at the nature of his dismissal, which he calls a “coup d’etat.”

Sahashi says he first heard he had been dismissed as NOVA president at 5:30 a.m. on Oct. 26. He was woken by a phone call from a friend and given the news that he had been fired and NOVA was applying for protection from its creditors.

“I was shocked,” Sahashi says.

Sahashi says that divisions in the NOVA board first surfaced on Oct. 23, three days before he was fired. Sahashi gives his account of a conversation that occurred between himself and another NOVA director on that day.

DIRECTOR: Why don’t we apply for protection?

SAHASHI: We can’t. Why? Because I’ve got something (to raise money) and we can rebuild on our own.

DIRECTOR: Our employees don’t have the power to rebuild the company.

SAHASHI: Maybe we don’t have enough staff, but we can protect our students and employees. Our only option is to rebuild by ourselves.

DIRECTOR: I feel sorry for our employees in the firing line. That’s why we should apply for protection and then rebuild.

SAHASHI: The moment we do that, our students are going to vanish. What are we going to do about the students?

DIRECTOR: Apply for protection and we’ll find a sponsor.

SAHASHI: How will you find them?

DIRECTOR: There’s a bank that says it will help us.

SAHASHI: Which bank? Who have you been talking to?

DIRECTOR: I can’t say.

Soon after this alleged conversation, Sahashi says he received word from somebody who had been closely watching the NOVA executives.

“They warned me that the directors were being shifty. They told me that there was something strange about their behavior,” Sahashi says.

Sahashi says that before NOVA’s collapse, he twice had meetings with G.education, the group that ultimately came in to rescue the failed chain. Sahashi says he met G.education 38-year-old Chairman Masaki Inayoshi for the first time over the summer as NOVA sought a partner to tie up with to raise capital.

“I met Mr. Inayoshi twice, before and after the (mid-August) o-bon holiday. Inayoshi told me that he wanted to exchange shares and that he wanted to be the main shareholder. At that time, he presented me with a proposal where my shares would be split up into about five or six funds,” Sahashi says.

Inayoshi denies Sahashi’s claims.

“In about the middle of August, there was an approach to our shareholder Venture Capital about whether we would like to have a meeting with the NOVA president and that’s how I met Mr. Sahashi on two occasions. We never talked about a capital injection or exchanges of shares. I absolutely did not insist on becoming the main shareholder. I heard that NOVA was in a pretty poor state and told him that it would be extremely difficult for us to cooperate with him,” Inayoshi says.

Nonetheless, Sahashi still seems to feel that he has been set up for a takeover by G.education.

“There are signs that three directors had determined in advance that Oct. 26 would be D-Day, where the president would be fired and NOVA would apply for court protection. Even after I had submitted plans to merge schools and come up with money, the directors just ignored those plans and bought time until D-Day came around,” Sahashi says. “It takes time to apply for court protection from creditors. There’s a mountain of paperwork involved. It’s impossible to just suddenly make an application. NOVA’s lawyers made the application and I was unaware of what was going on. That’s a breach of trust.”

Sahashi maintains his stance that “there was a conspiracy to carry out a coup d’etat.”

“We were having trouble raising cash and were late in paying rents and employees’ wages. I guess the three directors thought the situation was no good. And I think maybe G.education got in on the act then, too. I don’t know which side initiated the conversations, but I have information that the directors were talking to G.education in advance of what happened,” Sahashi says.

Inayoshi once again denies Sahashi’s claims.

“That’s impossible, because we only met the receivers a short while before we were publicly announced as the company’s saviors. We were asked to show our plan to employees. That was three days before we were named to take over NOVA. It’s really sad he thinks he was caught in a coup d’etat and that we were involved in it,” Inayoshi says.

Despite Sahashi’s claims that he is the victim of a conspiracy, he can’t deny that he is suspected of hiding money.

One instance where he is accused of secreting cash away involves Ginganet, a communications company and subsidiary wholly owned by Sahashi and his relatives that owns the patent rights to the TV monitor system the conversation chain used to provide some lessons. Receivers say Ginganet sold the monitors to NOVA at heftily inflated prices to create profits that didn’t really exist. Receivers consider the Ginganet dealings as possible cases of aggravated breach of trust or embezzlement.

Sahashi denies the claims.

“Ginganet developed the systems, but they were assembled overseas by an assembly specialist. The factory is in Thailand. Assembly made up 60 percent of the wholesale cost of the machines and when you add in the commission for the assembler, it went over 80 percent. Put in the development costs and it means that Ginganet was actually selling the monitors at a loss,” Sahashi says.

He continues: “If I had any secret funds, I would have funneled them back into NOVA and rebuilt the company immediately. I used my personal assets, NOVA shares and my shares in other companies as collateral to raise money. Rather than having any secret funds hidden away, I’m a victim in this. I haven’t put a single yen in my pockets,” Sahashi says.

NOVA, however, is not so sure.

“There are absolutely no grounds to back up what Mr. Sahashi says (about Ginganet),” a NOVA spokesman says. “We are considering pressing charges.”

Joji Yabuki, head of the NOVA Seito no Kai, an association of students of the failed conversation chain, insists Sahashi show some sincerity.

“He should hold a news conference and apologize to all of us. If he’s not prepared to put in some of his own money to a fund aimed at helping students made victims by the school’s collapse, it’s hard to see him as being very sincere. There are 300,000 of us who are furious,” Yabuki says.

Sahashi is aware of the anger rising up against him across Japan.

“I have a large responsibility to bear and I sometimes feel like hanging my head in shame. Of course, bearing the ultimate responsibility, I feel absolutely terrible about what has happened to students and staff,” Sahashi says, but he is less forthcoming when asked if he plans to front the media to apologize publicly. “Do you think I’ll be able to finish everything just by fronting a news conference and saying ‘Sorry?’ ‘Responsibility’ for me means the responsibility to rebuild NOVA. How do the directors who proposed the takeover plan to take responsibility? They deserve to die 10,000 deaths!”

http://mdn.mainichi.jp/national/news/20071119p2a00m0na036000c.html

A labor union representing former teachers at failed Nova Corp. launched a program Saturday that enables students to pay for language lessons by buying them meals instead of paying tuition fees.

Nova has closed its schools nationwide, depriving nearly 300,000 students of classes and keeping the teachers out of work and pinched for money.

At a Tokyo park Saturday afternoon, teacher Kristen Moon, 23, gave a lesson lasting about an hour based on topics in an English-language magazine to 32-year-old Yasuhiro Kawatani. They then went to a nearby restaurant afterward.

http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/nb20071118a3.html

The NOVA Students’ Association held its first meeting here on Friday, with many students appearing worried as they listened to the explanations about the company.

About 1,000 participants poured into a hall in Osaka with a capacity of about 250, prompting the sponsor of the meeting to quickly find another location.

The group was formed earlier this month by about 70 students from areas such as Osaka and Tokyo. On Friday, the group’s representative, Joji Yabuki, explained the negotiating conditions between NOVA’s preservation administrators and Nagoya-based company G.education, which has stepped in to take over NOVA’s business.

Some students who participated in the gathering called for pursuit of former NOVA President Nozomu Sahashi’s responsibility over NOVA’s downfall. Others asked that they be able to continue their lessons at G.education without having to pay any extra.

http://mdn.mainichi.jp/national/news/20071117p2a00m0na005000c.html

Preparatory school operator G.education has officially taken over NOVA, the failed operator of Japan’s largest English conversation school chain, company officials said.

The takeover took effect after a representative for G.education and receivers for NOVA signed an agreement on the handover on Tuesday.

Osaka-based NOVA filed for court protection from creditors under the Corporate Rehabilitation Law on Oct. 26. Receivers for NOVA decided on Nov. 6 to hand over its school chain to Nagoya-based G.education.

http://mdn.mainichi.jp/national/news/20071115p2a00m0na003000c.html

A company that has taken over NOVA Corp., the failed English school chain, has opened a new school here, company officials said.

G.education, based in Nagoya, remodeled its “EC” English school as a NOVA school and opened it near Nagoya Station in Nakamura-ku.

The company will hold meetings for NOVA students and new students on Thursday and Saturday in addition to one it held on Wednesday. The new school can accept about 200 students and it will continue to teach EC students.

The new school is set to start lessons next week, according to officials.

http://mdn.mainichi.jp/national/news/20071114p2a00m0na028000c.html

The court-appointed trustees of Nova Corp. have given up trying to rehabilitate the nation’s largest language-school chain and have chosen a Nagoya-based company to take over part of Nova’s business. Although the trustees’ quick decision suggested that a business solution was at hand and the new company says it will “basically hire” all Nova teachers and workers who want a job with it, the problem of unpaid salaries for Nova’s 7,000 workers, including some 4,000 foreign teachers, remains. Moreover, there are no prospects of refunds for unused lesson tickets still held by Nova students.

For the time being, G.education Co., a wholly owned subsidiary of the G.communication group, will take over 30 of about 670 Nova branches. G.education, which runs cram and English schools, hopes to take over 200 branches between six months and a year from now. But this will be far from satisfactory for some 300,000 Nova students. In fact, the G.communication head says it will be difficult to reopen the remaining branches.

Nova students can receive lessons similar to Nova’s if they pay 25 percent of what they have already paid for lesson tickets; enrollment fees will be waived. Even so, the arrangement means a new financial burden for Nova students.

Nova students are especially worried about refunds for the money they have paid in advance for lessons. This up-front money amounts to ¥60 billion to ¥70 billion. These students constitute “the largest number of creditors” in postwar Japan. Since G.education is not prepared to make refunds, public administrative bodies should involve themselves to help solve the problem.

The failure of Nova points to the need for the education industry, including language-school chains, to take measures to stabilize their business and increase trustworthiness. An encouraging sign is a move by several major English language-school chains to welcome more than 8,000 Nova students by offering discount rates. They have decided to cooperate with each other in order to restore people’s trust in language-school chains and to minimize the effect of the Nova problem.

http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/ed20071113a2.html

Nagoya-based G. communication Group, which will take over business operations of the failed English-language school chain Nova Corp., announced Monday it had issued unofficial job offers to 1,760 foreign teachers and Japanese staff formerly employed by Nova.

G. communication plans to issue job offers to a further 694 people from Nova who have registered their desire to be reemployed, meaning about half of the about 4,900 workers employed by Nova when the firm filed for court protection under the Corporate Rehabilitation Law stand to gain reemployment.

G. communication’s subsidiary G. education Co., which operates cram schools and will take over Nova’s operations, will begin offering lessons at 30 Nova branches from Wednesday.

About 3,500 people attended briefings about reemployment held by Nova on Friday and Saturday. Of these, 1,548 foreign teachers and 212 Japanese employees were given unofficial job offers.

Some of the further 694 people who requested reemployment are seeking positions with G. communication affiliates.

Furthermore, as G. communication received inquiries from some foreign teachers and Japanese staff who did not attend the briefings held last week, the number of people to be reemployed with the firm and its affiliates is likely to increase.

G. communication plans to assign 10 to 15 foreign teachers to each Nova branch, and expects to reopen more than 100 Nova branches before the end of this year.

http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/dy/national/20071113TDY02307.htm