The death of NOVA

Everytime I see Nova's rabbit mascot I just want to pummel it.


You know that friend of yours/cousin/friend of your brother's that went to Japan and taught English for a year or two? Odds are very good he worked for Nova, Japan's biggest English conversation school, with over 900 little school clustered around the nations train stations. Nova will soon close 200 of those schools, including the branch in Nishijin here in Fukuoka, and rumors abound that the entire chain could soon go out of business.

Nova is one of the few schools that takes on the expense of recruiting young foreigners fresh out of college with no teaching experience from overseas, and setting them up to come here. Most other schools basically hire off their backs- people start at Nova, get situated with visas, and then hop to other places. But as good as an option as it's been for people to get here, and as many foreigners as they've brought to Japan, I can't say I'll be sorry to see them go.

One reason is because NOVA is, by all accounts, the lousiest eikaiwa conversation school to be stuck working at in Japan. They cram you into a small apartment with two roomates, then charge you about double or triple the real rent, and pocket the difference themselves, essentially nabbing back a good chunk of their teacher's already low salaries. They are known as "NOVAcation" because of strict hours that have teachers coming in to work even on christmas day (And no, don't expect they close on Japanese holidays either). Full-time, teachers are expected to pack in 40 classes a week, a ridiculous amount for a serious teacher.

Beyond that, they give a bad name to education here, too. For the longest time, moldy old textbooks from the late 70's/early 80's were used, complete with corny hairstyles and disco clothing. Teachers were not paid to come in and prep for lessons, tacitly encouraging them to just wander in, open the book to the next page, and wing lessons. That's because NOVA was never really set up as a real school, at least as far as the foreigner staff went. They were basically hired as pieces of meat, foreigners on display to parade in front of the customers and give them a chance to practice their English on.

Back in the 80's when any dorky guy with blondish hair could be considered Brad Pitt, and going to Nova was the only way a Japanese girl could find a foreigner boyfriend, that system was a big hit, and no-one really cared that it was all for show. But people are more sophisticated these days, and the gimmick is wearing off. (In case you think I'm exaggerating, here's a TV commercial in which Nova basically admits that their foreign staff is a joke, and pathetically tries to have a laugh about it. The announcer is saying "Its not all about looks- we train 'em tough!" The teachers are being whipped as they chant ("Please turn the textbook page!" "Good Job!" and other dumb-ass platitudes)



The interesting thing about this is that with NOVA gone, foreigners in Japan will lose what is quite likely their single biggest employer, and as many as 9000 foreigners will be out on the street. (the other big employer, the public school JET program, is also cutting back drastically, and the program is being phased out of Fukuoka city entirely).

The most resourceful of those foreign teachers will pick up the scraps by signing on former students for privates, and smaller schools will have their pick of tons of resumes for a while. But after that, there'll probably be significantly fewer newbie foreigners around.

It's funny...when I was in Niigata, almost every foreigner around had come through JET or NOVA. But those options exist less and less now. In Fukuoka, most of the newer people I know came through foreign exchange student programs, and are generally much more fluent in Japanese than foreigners in the past. It seems like just getting here for a year-long stint, once something practically anybody with a college degree could do, is getting more competitive than it used to be.