Nova goes supernova

Japan's largest English teaching school, Nova Corp., went out of business last month, costing about 5,000 foreign English teachers and 2,000 Japanese support staff their jobs.¹

Down from a high last year of about two-thirds, Nova held a 50% market share of the $1.7 billion foreign language-teaching industry.²

Of their 670 schools across the country, only 200 will be taken over by GEOS and some other schools, affecting some 3,000 students. Over 300,000 other students are out of luck completely.³ (The picture at right shows Nova's slogan: "Study abroad right in front of the station")

Nova's troubles stemmed from their tuition and refund policies. Before March of this year, students were encouraged to buy "class tickets" in huge blocks. Rather than getting a spot in a classroom for a term, they would buy the right to attend a English class that they could schedule later.

The problem was that there was never any space, and when they tried to get a refund on their "tickets," it was at a lower rate. The dissatisfied students sued, and Japan's Supreme Court ruled in April that the refund policy was illegal.

In June, The Ministry of Trade, Economy and Industry forbade the school from selling long-term contracts -- effectively killing off their only source of revenue. The company could only hemorrage money from that point, and now has about $440 million in debt.

Japanese staff stopped getting paid in July, and the foriegners never got their October paycheck. The CEO, Sahashi Nozomu, borrowed a page from Enron and disappeared just before the stuff hit the fan, and has been in hiding since.⁴


On October 31, the Japanese press broadcast a video of Nozomu's palacial suite. (Click on the box to the left, or follow the link to the source page at Japan Probe.)





For me, Nova's crash came as a total surprise, but it also relieved me of a psychological burden I'd been feeling since the beginning of this year. Before decided to teach English in Korea again, I'd thought of going to Japan through Nova. When they rejected me, I felt really despondent.

But through this, I can see that it was for the best that I had been rejected. Though life isn't exactly glorious, I'm doing just fine. And that's more than anyone can say about those 5,000 teacher Nova just let go.

Here's a picture of a page from the Nova brochure I kept:

I'm sure I'm not the only one wondering.