crime

This is for you GEOS fanatics that can't get enough of the defunct school:

A JAPANESE-owned English language school has been ordered to pay one of its managers compensation of €30,000 and to increase her salary in line with that of a male counterpart.

The school, trading as GEOS Ireland, was found to have discriminated against Nerea Medrano on a number of grounds, including gender and family status.

From the Facebook page Please Stop the Sale of Tatsuya Ichihashi's Book comes this:

This is revolting. Tatsuya Ichihashi has written about his 31 months as a fugitive while in prision. According to the book's publisher, Gentosha, the book is "'part of an act of contrition for the crime," and said he plans to hand over any royalties to Hawker's family.'"

Three years after the collapse of Nova, there is finally some closure on the matter. Teachers are being paid the money owed them when the company went under, and ex-president Nozomu Sahashi will at last be behind bars after the Osaka High Court sentenced him to two years in prison for "corporate embezzlement."

If you're sick and tired of reading anything having to do with NOVA and Sahashi, you might want to stop reading right now.

Sahashi was back in court to have his appeal heard.

His lawyers still maintain that he is innocent and that his use of money from an employees' fund was to pay refunds and therefore does not amount to embezzlement. Sahashi was originally sentenced to three and half years for the crime.

This got buried in my stack of stuff to do, but why not haul out the rotten corpse that is Fortress Japan for another round of flogging? To recap, the Consumer Affairs Agency shut down Fortress Japan in February for six months over its coercive methods of signing up new students. The agency's report [PDF] contains five case studies that illustrate how Fortress Japan did business.

An update on former Nova president, Nozomu Sahashi's, appeal. You may recall that he was sentenced to three and half years for embezzlement last August. He quickly appealed his sentence, maintaining that he was innocent.

The Yomiuri Shimbun reports that the charge of aggravated breach of trust leveled by the Nova administrators against former Nova president, Nozomu Sahashi, has been dismissed.

Police in Japan are remarkably reactive and don't spend much time or energy working on crime prevention. Besides stopping the occasional cyclist and verifying ownership of said bicycle, offering directions or taking a spin on their scooters, they remain very low-key, but they are a constant presence. The officers are largely relegated to their small community police boxes that are centrally located close to train stations all over the country. The policing approach has been one that is based on police officers maintaining a visible presence.

It took the Consumer Affairs Agency long enough. From the Yomiuri Shimbun:

The Consumer Affairs Agency and the Tokyo metropolitan government on Thursday ordered a Tokyo-based English-language conversation school chain operator to suspend operations due to its coercive method of selling its services to university students and others.