Collapsed English-teaching company NOVA Corp., which has filed for financial protection, is in talks with several firms standing as candidates to bail out the company, it has been learned.

All of the firms are operating businesses, and none of them are investment funds, officials said. NOVA hopes to decide on a firm to provide financial support no later than next week.

Toshiaki Higashibatake, a lawyer serving as a protective administrator for NOVA, said that NOVA officials talked with one company in Tokyo on Monday, and two companies in Osaka on Tuesday. There were reportedly other companies that were interested in stepping in to aid NOVA.

All of the firms in talks with NOVA planned to shut unprofitable schools, and pick up the business by reducing the current number of schools by about half. Some firms were reportedly prepared to guarantee a certain percentage of lesson fees that students had paid in advance.

NOVA reportedly plans to give preference to a firm that will maintain the company’s nationwide network. It reportedly had offers from a firm wanting a split transfer, and received proposals from an investment fund, but turned the offers down.

http://mdn.mainichi.jp/national/news/20071101p2a00m0na014000c.html

Nova may file criminal charges against former President Nozomu Sahashi over questionable transactions between the failed foreign-language school chain and a firm he effectively ran, court-appointed administrator Toshiaki Higashibata said Tuesday.

He also said Sahashi, who was ousted by Nova’s board of directors last week, had contacted him and implied he would challenge the board’s decision.

According to Higashibata, Nova Corp. bought videophone equipment from Ginganet Co., an Osaka-based firm effectively controlled by Sahashi, and sold the devices to students at prices several times above cost.

Nova paid Ginganet ¥8.2 billion for the equipment over a five-year period dating from 2002, he said.

“We understand there was a scheme to funnel money” from the students to Osaka-based Ginganet by way of Nova, Higashibata said, noting Sahashi could face aggravated breach of trust charges.

He also revealed that Sahashi, one of Nova’s cofounders, sold all his shares in two firms effectively under his control ? including Ginganet ? to one person around the time Nova filed for protection from creditors on Oct. 26.

Earlier Tuesday, Nova said the equity stakes held by Sahashi and his family fell sharply in the April-September half for unknown reasons.

As of Sept. 30, Sahashi and an Osaka-based firm fully owned by him and his family held a combined 20.2 percent of Nova’s total voting rights, compared with 72.6 percent as of March 31.

Nova said it did not know what instigated the sudden change. Sahashi’s failure to notify financial authorities, however, may have violated the financial product transactions law.

Sahashi was fired by Nova’s board of directors in absentia on Oct. 25, and his whereabouts remains unknown.

But Higashibata said Sahashi contacted him via a lawyer Tuesday afternoon and suggested that he would legally challenge the board’s decision to remove him as president.

Other tidbits revealed at the news conference include the revelation that Sahashi received about ¥310 million in executive salary for the business year to March 2006, the year Nova recorded a loss of about ¥3.1 billion ? its first ever.

On Tuesday, Higashibata also let the media peek inside Sahashi’s opulent suite on the 20th floor of Nova’s administrative headquarters in Osaka.

“We are showing this as an example of his (Sahashi) calling the company his own,” he said.

The 330-sq.-meter executive suite has a red-carpeted reception room, a luxurious private dining and living area with large-screen TV, a bathroom with a sauna, a tea room and a room with a double bed.

Nova was paying ¥2.7 million a month to rent the suite, which cost ¥60 million to ¥70 million to furnish and decorate, Higashibata said.

Nova filed for bankruptcy under the Corporate Rehabilitation Law with a debt estimated at about ¥43.9 billion as of the end of July, and two administrators appointed by the Osaka District Court are searching for sponsors to help turn it around.

Higashibata said Nova is negotiating with interested companies but did not identify them.

Nova spoke in Tokyo with one firm Monday and with two companies in Osaka on Tuesday, he said, adding that others have offered support or showed willingness to take over some of its operations.

http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/nn20071101a3.html

While 300,000 students are worrying about their prepaid tuition and 4,900 foreign teachers are waiting for unpaid wages, lawyers appointed to act as receivers for the bankrupt Nova Corp. recently discovered that Nozomu Sahashi, the former president, had secretly sold a 50%-plus stake in the ailing English-language school chain.

Japan’s biggest foreign language school, Nova Corp. said Tuesday the combined shareholdings of former President Sahashi and his Osaka-based family company fell sharply to 20.2% at the end of September from 70.6% as of the end of March, for unknown reasons. Nova said in a press release that, although the change in the stock holding was sudden and big, no details about it are available at the moment, according to Jiji Press.

If Sahashi is proved to have sold his shares without filing a report with the securities regulatory authority, the receivers will file a criminal complaint with law enforcement. In Japan, a major shareholder with a 5% stake or more in a listed company is required to disclose any share transaction within five business days.

More than 90% of the value of Nova shares has evaporated over the past year, and the stock will be delisted from Jasdaq on November 27.

Sahashi was removed from his post last Thursday after he failed to show up at a board meeting held at Nova’s Tokyo office. The other board members, after rejecting Sahashi’s last-minute request to change the meeting venue, sacked the president and immediately filed for court protection from creditors under Japan?s Corporate Rehabilitation Law.

The 56-year-old Sahashi has yet to appear to give his interpretation of the situation. His egoistic character and autocratic administration have been widely criticized as bringing about the collapse of Nova, leaving total liabilities of 43.9 billion yen and disrupting the lives of the school’s students and teachers.

Sahashi launched a tiny English-language school after returning from a sojourn in Paris in 1981. Thanks to the neglect of English-language education in traditional schools, Nova’s bright blue neon boxes quickly spread across the country, and the company became Japan’s biggest network of centers for learning English.

Yet, when the number of Nova schools reached 900, emergency signals began to light up. Consumer affairs offices across the country were busy with complaints filed by Nova’s students who received no instruction despite having prepaid for their lessons. Landlords? lawsuits against Nova over unpaid rent began to pile up. The authority instituted a six-month ban in June, prohibiting Nova from signing new contracts with customers of more than one year or more than 70 hours of instruction, as a penalty for giving false claims about its lessons to prospective students, which finally pushed the ailing education concern to the brink of bankruptcy.

Nova seemed to have found a white knight in May, when its board was in talks with leading retailer Marui for a business tie-up. Nevertheless, Sahashi walked away from the discussion table during the final stage of negotiations, as he was reportedly dissatisfied with the arrangement that he would have to give up his position as president. In turning down Marui’s 6.6 billion yen ($57.71 million) capital injection, he left his foreign teaching corps in despair.

The foreign instructors have yet to receive any paychecks since September. Some of these, who are mostly young graduates seeking to experience life in Japan, have even been evicted from apartments provided by Nova. The Osaka Labor Bureau announced on Monday it would ask Nova’s receivers to confirm the home addresses of those teachers who return to their home countries without receiving wages.

Since Friday, 76 foreign instructors from Nova have visited the Osaka Employment Service Center for consultations. The center also has received 127 telephone inquiries, mostly concerning the unpaid wages, according to Mainichi Daily News.

The Australian and British embassies in Japan have set up special units to assist their nationals. Australia’s national carrier, Qantas, is also prepared to offer discounts to Nova teachers looking to head back home.

http://www.forbes.com/markets/2007/10/30/nova-language-centers-markets-equity-cx_vk_1030markets03.html

Westerners, including Oregonians, who taught English

Growing up in Oregon, Kristen Campbell-Schmitt folded intricate paper cranes, worked in a Japanese restaurant and took a high school trip to Japan. Her passion for the country extended through the University of Oregon and returned her to Tokyo, where she began teaching English in 2005.

Now Campbell-Schmitt, 26, finds herself stranded in Japan, caught with thousands of other Western workers in the implosion of the nation’s largest English-teaching firm. The company president has vanished, debt exceeds $380 million, and 400,000 students want refunds.

Campbell-Schmitt scrapes by on money sent from her parents in Portland, unable to leave for fear of forfeiting the $10,000 she’s owed. Dustin McDonald, a 23-year-old from the Portland area, eats cheap noodles while money dwindles, job hunting in a country whose language he cannot understand.

The collapse of Nova Corp., Japan’s largest private employer of foreign nationals, exposes a dark side of the nation’s English-language boom. A country eager to grow more international faces embarrassment as young Westerners become homeless on its streets. Young English teachers, white-collar migrant workers of the global era, find themselves lost in translation.

“People are stranded and angry,” says Campbell-Schmitt, one of an unknown number of Oregonians caught in the collapse. “There’s whole blogs now on the best trains to pickpocket on.”

Japan’s English craze ignited during the nation’s roaring 1980s, when a strong economy and a fashion for fluency drew Americans and other native speakers. The gaijin, or foreigners, made small fortunes chatting with salarymen and housewives.

The Nova Group, founded in 1981, went public in 1996 on a stock exchange now known as Jasdaq. By 2005, Nova had 977 schools and about 500,000 students nationwide.

The influx of foreign teachers in Japan depressed pay. Nova alone employed at least 4,000 teachers, hailing from the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and other countries.

Nova’s bright blue signs and animated pink-rabbit logo spread as its branches popped up around train stations faster than Starbucks outlets.

Two years ago, Campbell-Schmitt, a 2004 UO political-science graduate, grew suspicious when the 40-hour-a-week contract she had signed in San Francisco became a 34-hour deal in Japan. She believes Nova made the switch to avoid providing teachers with health insurance as a benefit, instead selling coverage to them.

Campbell-Schmitt enjoyed some aspects of her job, especially meeting Japanese and other expatriates. “And then you find out that it really is about half teaching and half kind of like a hostess club,” said Campbell-Schmitt, referring to bars in Japan where men pay for women’s attention.

“Half of these students aren’t here to learn English,” she says. “They’re just here to socialize with foreigners or to escape their wives or to try to pick us up, which is really pretty creepy.”

Teachers’ worst fears came true last March when the body of Lindsay Ann Hawker, a 22-year-old Nova teacher from Britain, was found in a sand-filled bathtub on the balcony of an apartment outside Tokyo. She had gone there to teach.

In April, a Supreme Court ruled in favor of a student who sought full refunds for unused lessons. Next, the Japanese government prohibited Nova from entering further long-term contracts with students. Amid the bad publicity, many students also canceled.

McDonald of Fairview heard rumors of Nova’s troubles in mid-August after arriving in Japan. An earlier teaching job in Taiwan had evaporated, he says, because of visa problems. But the Portland State University psychology graduate began teaching for Nova near Tokyo.

“They were cutting corners everywhere they could,” McDonald says. Nova often assigned three teachers to one apartment, he says, charging each full rent.

On Sept. 15, McDonald was paid for the portion of August that he’d worked. Many other Nova teachers, including Campbell-Schmitt, received nothing. “First they just told us it’d be late,” she says.

Pay for September never came. Last Friday, Nova filed for bankruptcy protection after firing its president, Nozomu Sahashi, who has disappeared from public view.

Many Nova teachers plan to hang on in Japan at least until Nov. 5, when interim managers face a deadline for finding investors to rescue the firm. But landlords are evicting teachers, many of whom have nowhere to go.

McDonald — who’s down to $300 and owed about $2,500 — eats two meals a day to save money. He applied for one job that had more than 1,000 applicants. Today, he received an eviction notice.

Campbell-Schmitt moved on Monday into a friend’s apartment. Some Japanese have tried to help, she says. Convenience-store clerks give out free peanuts, she says.

McDonald and Campbell-Schmitt, who don’t know each other, say the experience hasn’t soured them on all Japanese.

“They accept me to a certain degree,” Campbell-Schmitt says. “But when it really comes down to something like this, it’s like all of a sudden you’re alone again.”

http://www.oregonlive.com/business/oregonian/index.ssf?/base/news/1193801150304310.xml&coll=7

The caretaker administrator of Nova Corp. announced Tuesday that they had started negotiations with three firms–one based in Tokyo and two in Osaka–to become corporate sponsors as part of efforts to rehabilitate the failed English conversation school chain operator.

The administrator said he hoped to be able to choose a corporate sponsor next week.

One of the firms showed serious interest in taking over Nova’s operations in their entirety, he said.

The firm reportedly has agreed to hire Nova employees and foreign instructors, as well as accept students.

The three firms, however, did not include leading conversation school chain Aeon Co. or IT firm Rakuten Inc., both of which had initially been regarded as firms likely to support Nova’s rehabilitation.

===

Sahashi, firm see drop in shares

Recently fired Nova Corp. President Nozomu Sahashi and a company with close ties to him, formerly the two largest shareholders in the English conversation school chain operator that filed for court protection on Friday, saw sharp declines in their shares of the Osaka-based school operator, Nova announced Tuesday.

Nova Kikaku, the Osaka-based company with ties to Sahashi, who was dismissed Thursday, had fallen from its place as the firm’s largest shareholder to its third-largest shareholder as of Sept. 30. The company owned 36.58 percent of outstanding voting shares of Nova as of March 31. But the shares declined to 3.75 percent as of Sept. 30.

Meanwhile, Sahashi’s stake in Nova dropped from 36.11 percent to 16.27 percent.

http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/dy/national/20071031TDY02311.htm

Collapsed English-teaching company NOVA Corp. has unveiled the luxury office used by its former boss Nozomu Sahashi to the public, showing a bathroom overlooking the night scenery and expensive champagne and scotch whisky lined up at a bar counter.

The 330-square-meter office, which has its own sauna and tea room, is located on the top floor of a 20-story building in Osaka’s Naniwa-ku. The 70 million yen makeover of the apartment and the monthly rent of 2.7 million yen was picked up by NOVA, but hardly any NOVA employees have been there.

“I had heard rumors about it, but I never imagined it was as luxurious as this,” one surprised company employee who saw the office said.

A lawyer serving as a protective administrator for NOVA, which has sought court protection following its collapse, said the office was a symbol of how Sahashi had used the company’s profits to his advantage.

“We decided to unveil it as a symbol of Sahashi’s misappropriation from the company,” the lawyer said.

http://mdn.mainichi.jp/national/news/20071031p2a00m0na027000c.html

Comparisons have been drawn between the business practices used by Nova Corp. and the scandal-hit nursing care provider Comsn Inc., as well as the manner in which both firms fell from grace.

On June 13, the Economy, Trade and Industry Ministry suspended Nova for six months from signing up students on new contracts of one year or longer over misdemeanors that included lying to prospective students by telling them that they could book lessons any time they wanted.

On the same day, Goodwill Group Inc., the parent company of Comsn, announced the care provider would withdraw from the business after the Health, Labor and Welfare Ministry had earlier barred the issuance of care facility licenses to the firm due to fraudulent applications it had made to acquire such licenses and other discrepancies.

Ousted Nova founder Nozumu Sahashi reportedly objected to Nova being compared to Comsn on TV news programs.

However, the paths taken by both companies seem to overlap in an oddly striking manner.

Both were run by extremely autocratic leaders who assigned employees excessive quotas to fill, and built up a network of either facilities or schools by investing large sums of money in advertising and publicity.

Nova’s rapid growth was supported by its colorful TV commercials, which gave birth to popular characters such as the Nova Rabbit, as well its inexpensive lesson fees.

During fiscal 2005, a year in which the company sharply increased new schools, it racked up 11 billion yen in publicity expenses–about one-sixth of its turnover in that period.

One trick Nova used to inflate its earnings was to treat a portion of students’ prepaid lesson fees as “enrollment fees.”

“I paid 320,000 yen in fees for additional lessons, but my contract said that 30,000 yen was for enrollment fees and 290,000 yen for lessons,” a student who renewed a contract in March 2005 said. “Every time I asked about this, I wasn’t given a satisfactory explanation.”

Accounting rules say enrollment fees can be posted as sale proceeds that can be used as operating capital. Thus, 30,000 yen was marked off as operating capital.

The low lesson prices also made Nova stand out from its competitors. The cost per lesson at other leading chains ranges from 2,300 yen to 5,000 yen, compared with about 1,800 yen a lesson for students who signed up for the longest contracts with Nova.

Rival chains wondered how Nova could keep prices so low and still stay in business. What made this possible was Nova’s doing everything in its power to cut labor costs.

About 80 percent of the nearly 1,000 new Japanese employees taken on each year were female. Despite having to meet each school’s strict contract quota and often having to work until late at night, the monthly take-home pay for a person in their fifth year at the company would be only about 180,000 yen.

“It’s our basic policy to have people quit while their wages are low,” a former executive and close associate of Sahashi said. “It’s better to have young women soliciting prospective students.”

With the average length of time an employee spends at the company being three years and seven months, Nova would have a fresh intake of new employees four times a year.

A Nova advertising sign states that “All instructors are native speakers.”

The 5,000 foreign instructors working at more than 900 schools also have been hit hard by recent events.

“I just got married, and things would be really hard now without my wife’s income,” said Bob Tench, a 49-year-old British teacher who has been with the company for 13 years.

Since September, when wages started to be paid late, many instructors have faced financial hardships and are being forced to return to their home countries.

Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer, seeing the plight of many Australian teachers who work for Nova, announced state support for them on the radio on Oct. 12.

Both the Australian and British embassies in Tokyo have been displaying information on legal and employment consultations on their Web sites since Saturday.

With this leading firm found to have violated the law and collapsed all too easily, the image of Japan’s English-language schools overseas has been dealt a severe blow.

http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/dy/national/20071031TDY01301.htm

Former NOVA President Nozomu Sahashi has come under suspicion of unfairly profiting from the sale of overpriced video-phone equipment, a lawyer for the collapsed English-teaching company has announced.

Toshiaki Higashibatake, a lawyer serving as a preservation administrator for NOVA, made the announcement at a news conference in Osaka. The lawyer said a company that was in essence fully owned by Sahashi’s family was suspected of buying video phones from a manufacturer and selling them to NOVA for several times the original price, thereby allowing Sahashi to profit unfairly.

“We are investigating whether this constitutes aggravated breach of trust or misappropriation,” Higashibatake said, indicating that both civil and criminal legal proceedings were being considered.

The lawyer said the video phones were provided by communications firm Ginganet Co., which holds the patents to the video-phone system used in NOVA’s “Ochanoma Ryugaku” home lessons. NOVA reportedly invested 7 billion yen in the development of the service. Higashibatake said that over five years from July 2002, NOVA bought 100,000 units from Ginganet, paying out 8.2 billion yen.

Higashibatake said that immediately after NOVA collapsed and a protective court order was issued, Sahashi sold all of the shares he held in Ginganet and the travel firm NTB Co., including those held by his relatives, to a single person.

“I was hoping that he would take responsibility for his management of the company and entrust all of the shares to a preservation administrator, but what has happened is really regrettable. I’m furious about it,” the lawyer said.

http://mdn.mainichi.jp/national/news/20071031p2a00m0na025000c.html

It’s said that the bigger they come, the harder they fall, and it’s difficult to imagine a harder fall than Nova’s.

Following Nova Corp.’s well-documented troubles over the last few months, Japan’s biggest language school chain is now in the hands of administrators, and is likely to be declared bankrupt next month unless a backer is found. Students and teachers have been left in the lurch, unsure of when or if they will ever receive money they are owed by the company.

But how long has the crash been coming? If the company’s pay policy is any indication, for quite a while. According to instructors who were with Nova around 2000, annual raises of ¥10-15,000 a month were handed out almost as a matter of routine. However, this has changed in recent years; while pro rata starting salaries have remained unchanged, most new instructors were hired on reduced-hour contracts (34 or 37 lessons a week, rather than 40) with a lower base salary to match. Annual raises were also cut back, to generally no more than ¥5,000, usually less.

Wages at Nova have fallen, and while specific statistics on foreign teachers’ pay are unavailable, the evidence of job Web sites and recruitment ads, as well as the general feeling among teachers, point to a significant and continuing downturn in wages across the whole “eikaiwa” (conversation school) industry.

Teachers who have lived in Japan for a number of years say they have seen the average salary drop substantially, a result they put down to the end of the bubble economy, changes in employment law, and an increase in the number of teachers. One Australian instructor who has been living and working here for 15 years noted that for the first few years after he arrived, “most teachers were taking home a minimum of ¥350,000 per month.”

In addition, “there were always well-paid part-time jobs, some well over ¥10,000 an hour, so it was quite simple to supplement your salary and take home well over ¥400,000 to ¥500,000 per month.”

These days, while there are still entry-level teaching jobs that pay ¥250,000 per month or more, it’s not uncommon to see others paying as little as ¥200,000.

Hourly rates for part-timers have seen a similar decline ? ¥4,000 appears to be the ceiling, with the average being somewhere between ¥2,000 and ¥2,500.

Salaries go down and workers complain ? it happens in every country and every industry. In fact, since the turn of the century in Japan, average wages have fallen from around ¥305,000 per month to ¥284,000. However, this is a much less dramatic drop than that of foreign teachers’ wages, and the trend in Japan is starting to reverse, with salaries up almost 1 percent on last year.

Usually, employers are happy to be in such a position ? it’s a buyer’s market and they can hire for less. However, the old adage that “you get what you pay for” also applies. As wages have dropped, say school owners and recruiters, so has the quality of teachers.

“As a school owner for many years and involved actively in recruitment, the quality of resumes I get is exceptionally poor,” complained Ash Warren, who runs a number of schools in Tokyo. “Very few people have actual qualifications as a foreign language teacher, such as CELTA, DELTA or an MA in TESOL.”

Whereas in the past there was a wealth of qualified teachers, Warren rued the fact that now “most resumes are from people who have no experience at all or who have worked for one of the major schools like Nova for a few years.”

His feelings were echoed by others involved in teacher recruitment. Lack of qualifications and experience were the most common complaints, but other HR staff spoke of applicants who seemed to be looking for little more than a visa, and carbon-copy resumes that had obviously been sent out en masse.

Those who suffer most from a lack of quality teachers are inevitably the students. Most school owners and administrators interviewed said that this was one of their biggest problems.

“As the dearth of qualified ? or at least highly experienced ? teachers increases, the quality of training students receive is bound to get worse,” said Warren.

Ken Worsley of Japan Economy News sees Nova’s downfall in the context of a move by students away from the big “eikaiwa” chains and the expansionist, wage-cutting model Nova boss Nozomu Sahashi took to its extreme.

“As the ESL industry grows, the share that goes to large-scale English conversation schools continues to shrink,” explained Worsley. “They have relied on cost-cutting strategies, which may be effective to some degree, but ultimately fail because they do not address revenue-side issues.”

There’s good reason to imagine that Nova’s bankruptcy would have a negative impact on wages, at least in the short term. Though many teachers would likely leave Japan, there would still be hundreds ? possibly thousands ? of newly unemployed teachers joining those already looking for work.

“I think we’ve been seeing a stream of teachers looking for new work over the past couple of months, and that market is only going to get more competitive,” said Worsley. “It is quite likely that we will see somewhat lower wages over the next year, although if a significant number of teachers were to leave Japan, there could be a shortage of teachers and wages might stay the same.”

The scenario in the event of a Nova recovery could be even bleaker for teachers’ pay packets.

“If Nova finds a backer, I doubt that they would assume responsibility for Nova’s unpaid wages,” warned Worsley. “Assuming responsibility for this cost is not a requirement of the trustees who have been appointed to find a buyer for Nova. It is quite possible that a buyer could decide to terminate all existing employment and re-hire a crew of teachers, though there are of course costs associated in doing this.”

This would allow the new firm to re-hire an entire workforce at entry-level wages, so that former Nova teachers might find themselves having to take a pay cut to get their old jobs back, for lack of any other opportunities. The negative effect this would have on wages throughout the industry is easy to imagine.

On the other hand, some dare to believe that the disappearance of Nova from the scene could have a positive effect.

“This might actually be a good thing in terms of making the market a bit more savvy about where to go for an English lesson,” said Warren. “People are finally beginning to look past the idea of investing in a big chain school, and thinking more about who is actually teaching them. Hopefully, people are realizing that the teacher is the most important thing.”

If this is the case, schools will have little choice but to hire well-qualified and experienced teachers, and the only way they will be able to do so will be by offering a genuinely attractive salary.

http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/fl20071030zg.html

The government has promised to offer support for Nova Corp. in seeking corporate sponsors to help its turnaround efforts, lawyers working for the failed language school chain said Monday.

“We came here to ask for help to find sponsors and also for support to Nova students who have been unable to take lessons,” lawyer Toshiaki Higashibata told reporters after visiting the Ministry of Economy Trade and Industry.

METI accepted the request, Higashibata said, although details such as how deeply the ministry will be involved have yet to be discussed.

He also said the number of Nova students who cannot study stands at some 300,000 because the company has halted classes nationwide.

The Osaka District Court last week appointed Higashibata and another lawyer to serve as administrators of Nova’s assets.

The court granted Osaka-based Nova protection from creditors Friday following its nonpayment of wages to employees.

Higashibata said he has not been able to contact ousted Nova President Nozomu Sahashi, whose whereabouts has been unknown for some time.

Despite the government’s promise of assistance, however, METI appeared to be struggling to decide how to proceed.

Shinji Fujino, METI’s service industry division director, said in a news conference, “We will move between Nova and industry bodies and will also consider an intermediary role in seeking sponsors if requested.”

But he admitted that the ministry does not know what commitment it can legally make.

“We are not authorized by any specific laws” in cases like this, Fujino said. “So we have to examine what we can do.”

Even if Nova finds a sponsor as it rehabilitates itself, many of its teachers have found themselves scouring a job market already flooded with job seekers. Public job centers say they have constantly received inquiries from such teachers, while the Australian, British and New Zealand embassies have offered assistance for finding work, although their help is limited because of their public nature.

http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/nn20071030a2.html