Nova schools shut down

Nova, the lagest eikaiwa chain in Japan, which employs about 5000 foreign residents, has filed for bankrupcy protection and temporarily closed all of its schools due to its financial difficulties. The signs on it's ubiquitous station-front eikaiwa schools continue to be lit up, although the offices usually full of office workers and students taking lessons after work are empty and dark.

As most of the workers are dependent on Nova for their visa in Japan, they will probably have to go home unless Nova can strike a deal to be taken over by another company, one likely candidate being HIS, a travel company. The students too, stand to lose out, as they pay upfront for a pack of one-year, two-year, or three-year's worth of lessons.

In fact these upfront payments on lessons are one of the major factors which caused Nova to collapse financially. After a student sued Nova early this year for a refund after he cancelled his lessons, and won in court, Nova found itself having to make backpayments on refunds to students. At the same time, the bad publicity in the press meant few new students were joining Nova, and this had been their only source of income.

I was briefly employed by Nova early this year, before quitting due to other work. At that point, they were also low on teachers. In fact, as I understood it at the time, they saw this as one of their main problems, as it meant that it was incredibly difficult for students to be able to book lessons, as they were always at full capacity for students.

Nova has had a lot of anti-Nova publicity on the web for years, which makes me wonder if this is why they were finding it difficult to get teachers. From my personal expereience of how I was treated by them, they were honest and definately better than some other eikaiwa schools in Japan. However I did come across people who'd been promised they'd be placed in certain areas in Japan before they took up the job in their home country, only to come here and be told there were no guarantees.

Some managers while I was there also were speculating on whether they would get any more teachers coming in, and talked as if the stream were about to dry up.

As I said, in my personal experience with Nova I was not betrayed by them. However, the school did charge, as most of the eikaiwa schools do, more than four times what the teacher earned where the class was a private one-on-one lesson. Anybody looking at this would have thought Nova would be making a windfall, as it was squeezing students and teachers as far as possible in each direction. It would be ironic if the entire reason they failed was because students and teachers felt ripped off and all pulled out at the same time.