Let's Japan.org Debunking Eikaiwa and Ramblings in Japan

The Fukuoka General Union has a long read titled The ALT Scam that points out the problems with BOEs outsourcing ALT jobs.

The main points are:

1. ALT jobs have been deemed a "service" so local governments can save money and avoid the management of foreign employees.
2. It is illegal for sub-contracted ALT teachers to work at public schools
3. ALTs/Dispatch companies don't know if they will get the next job/contract
4. Most ALT jobs advertised will not eventuate because they do not exsist and nobody knows if they will eventuate
5. Dispatch companies take big margins and the more they squeeze the ALT the more profit they make
6. Sub-contract ALTs are in reality double taxed losing 5% to consumption tax
7. Dispatch companies make profits from not enrolling ALTs in SH
8. A sub-contract ALT has practically no recourse if the school deems them sub-standard
9. BOEs ignore the Ministry of Education directive to employ ALTs directly
10. The BOE has no way of knowing if the dispatch company is breaking labour laws

Get a cup of your favorite beverage and read it all...

h/t Mogura

Forget about the popularity of eikaiwa online, it's iPods for everyone!

An elementary school in Wakayama has recently had an open English-language lesson using iPod Touch, with students watching video images of a native speaker on the small display of the digital handset.

The city plans to distribute 850 of the gadgets to local schools by mid-March, as part of projects backed by the Internal Affairs and Communications Ministry.

During the English lesson at Isao Elementary School on Wednesday, an American teacher shown on the touch-screen urged students to repeat useful phrases.

Because talking to a real live person would be a waste of perfectly good technology.

Japan Today has started a regular series on the state of the language school industry, in particular eikaiwa, written by Dean Rogers, president and CEO of Dean Morgan Co Ltd, the school that sounds like an investment company.

The first installment is an introduction laying out the ground to be covered, so there's not much meat in the article to talk about. However, I want to comment on the teacher statistics he uses. He talks about there being tens of thousands of English teachers in Japan. Fortunately, Adamu at Mutant Frog has done some research and found that the number of language instructors in Japan at the end of the 2008 was around 9,500. This is for all languages being taught in Japan, not just eikaiwa. If you factor in JETs, the number jumps to more than 10 thousand, but not tens of thousands.

If you're a regular reader of LJ, then you know that teaching English in Japan has been in the dumps for quite some time and is still in decline. The prospects for eikaiwa don't look bright when you factor in falling wages for instructors and lack of job security, the industry's tarnished image largely due to, but not limited to, the fallout from Nova's bankruptcy (lack of consumer confidence), an aging population (a shrinking customer base), and economic recession (less consumer spending and lower tax receipts putting the squeeze on local governments hiring instructors).

The series sounds promising though, so here's hoping that Dean makes the most of his columns.

Good news if you're worried about the possibility of your visa renewal being denied due to your lack of national health insurance coverage:

The Immigration Bureau is planning to change a new guideline for foreign residents to ease concerns that those without social insurance will be forced to choose between losing their visa and entering the insurance system, a bureau official said Monday.

[...]

"The bureau will delete item No. 8 by the end of March, and 'lightly mention' the need to present a health insurance card in the introductory passage of the guideline," Immigration Bureau spokesman Yoshikazu Iimura told The Japan Times. "The wording will be in a manner to eliminate foreign residents' concerns that their visas won't be renewed if they don't have insurance."

So now the Immigration Bureau will "lightly mention" that you should be
enrolled in shakai hoken or kokumin kenko hoken. Curiously, the article passes off the change as a victory:

Foreigners and their supporters have protested the new
guideline as an infringement on freedom of choice.

Back in September, The Japan Times interviewed Susumu Ikegami, a spokesman for Geos, and asked him about the eikaiwa market. To no surprise, he said business was down but for some reason could not explain why.

Four months later, this article, and the rumours swirling about the health of the company, have apparently prompted Geos to take action so to speak. What better forum to set the record straight than a puff piece in the ELT Gazette? A reader informs me that Geos "fights back" in the January issue in an article titled "GEOS rebuts crisis claims" (requires free registration to read the article).

Here's a sample of the spin that will leave you dizzy:

Geos Teaching Ltd’s human resources director Chad Lafferty, based in Japan, said, ‘Opening and closing locations is a normal part of business… The global recession has certainly impacted the way we do business, but it would be wrong to say that any closures or restructuring of the company are directly related to the recession.’

[...]

The push for better sales results is alleged to have blurred the line between sales and teaching. One former teacher, who asked not to be named, felt ‘let down by management’ and identified ‘sales skills required by teachers’ as one reason why Geos was not ‘a school a teacher could stay in for long’.

In response, Mr Lafferty stated that ‘all employees are told at the time of being hired that sales is a part of the job. They are also told that they should never make a recommendation that isn’t in the student’s best interest.’ He added, ‘The sales pressure on teachers hasn’t really increased or decreased in the past few years.’

One former Geos teacher claimed that her manager asked her to call students six months before course completion to get them to renew their contracts, and that when the company found out she was leaving, she was asked to tell students that their next teacher would be ‘good’ and to encourage them to stay.

Lafferty responded that he was ‘not aware of any teacher who has phoned a student to try and get them to renew their contracts. In fact, I’d be very strongly opposed to the idea.’ Lafferty added, ‘There is no directive from Geos saying, “You must tell your students the new teacher will be good.”’

I don't know how this quells any rumours about the health of the company or portrays Geos in a favorable manner. Lafferty didn't flat out lie in the interview, but he didn't tell the complete truth, either.

It's true that Geos tells its teachers that sales is part of the job, but he fails to say that it is a significant part of the job. It's the part of the job that reduces managers to tears and causes them to quit when they can't meet their sales targets. It is the source of angry faxes demanding that schools sell more and sign up or renew students. It's the reason why students avoid making eye contact with managers because they know if the manager nabs them, talk will inevitably be about buying more lessons.

The "there is no directive that says you must tell your students the new teacher will be good" are the words of a drone. "Yes sir! No, sir! Three bags full sir! Sell! Sell! Sell for the company!" Poor Chad Lafferty. He's sold his soul to Geos.

I'm late talking about this, but it's worth noting given Hoofin's recent comments on freechoice.jp and health insurance in Japan. After I was asked to take down a letter from a private insurance provider that I posted here, Hoofin went out and did some digging, and came up with a lot of interesting stuff.

1. He found that freechoice.jp's Ron Kessler is connected to HealthOne Japan.
2. In addition to HealthOne, Freechoice may also have links to other sites, including Legend Travel, Legend Travelers, and Nationalhealthinsurance.jp.
3. After Hoofin starts connecting dots, Nationalhealthinsurance.jp goes offline.

If Hoofin's findings are accurate, it makes you wonder if Kessler is honestly fighting for the right for foreigners to choose between national and private health insurance schemes or if he's fighting to protect his health insurance companies or the stakes he may have in them.

The letter that I removed from the blog concluded by urging readers to visit http://www.freechoice.jp/immigration2.asp for more information.Although the page is about "breaking news," as far as I can tell, you can't access it from anywhere within freedomchoice unless you've received the letter or were told about the page by Kessler. Despite the internal fax that apparently softens Immigration's stance on having to enroll in either shakai hoken or kokumin kenko hoken, there's been no independent verification of this to my knowledge. As it stands, the revisions to Guideline 8 are still in effect and immigration offices have signs up reminding people of the changes starting in April.

Moreover, it's difficult to think that Kessler is lobbying the government for change in good faith when he writes on the main page of his website, "Free choice means having the right to choose. A non-Japanese who desires to be on public health care should also not be denied access to it." He's full of it. Foreigners are not being denied access to healthcare in Japan. It is your right and obligation to be enrolled in shakai hoken or kokumin kenko hoken If anything is wrong, it's two things: 1) ignorance by employees and 2) far too many employers, especially in eikaiwa, intentionally not informing their employees of their right to healthcare and foisting some other plan upon them that is no more than travel insurance in disguise.

Can we trust anything on the freechoice website? His claim about Guideline 8 being put on hold hasn't been verified by any other source. Given that he may have incentives to skew things toward private insurance due to his possible connections to HealthOne, the answer has to be, "No."

At this time last year, with Nova gone, LJers in the forums were talking about how Skype and lessons online would be the future of eikaiwa. A year to the day that thread was started, J-cast News ran a story on the rapid growth of eikaiwa lessons online. The article reads more like an advertisement than a piece of journalism as it only focuses on three very new online schools, so it's difficult to gauge the popularity or success of online eikaiwa.

The article mentions three schools.

Gun-Gun

• Set up just this past September.
• For 6,000 yen a month allows you to take up to two 25-minute lessons a day via Skype. On a per lessons basis, that works out to 100 yen per lesson.
• Why are they so cheap? Their teachers are in the Philippines and work from their homes. Japanese staff travel to the Philippines to recruit experienced instructors and university grads.
• In just two months Gungun has 600 registered students and 30 instructors, with plans to hire another 10 to 20 instructors.
• Some of the instructors even speak Japanese and Gungun uses this as a sale point to reassure beginners.
• The "school" day runs from 10AM to 25PM, (Yes, the article says 25 o'clock. Only in Japan will you find the 25-hour, 26-hour, or even 27-hour clock.). The usual pattern is housewives in the morning followed by salarymen in the evening.
• Online lessons are already popular in Korea. (Nice dig at Japan, J-Cast. If the Koreans are already doing it, then Japan must be really, really far behind.)

Rare Job

• One of the biggest online schools, had 6,000 registered students at the beginning of September, which increased to 17,000 as of November.
• They started in 2007 with just 10 Filippino instructors and now boast 800 instructors.
• All of the instructors are either university students or graduates. This allows students to choose an instructor that meets their needs. For example, if a student wants to learn conversation in a medical setting, he can be paired with an instructor who has a medical background.
• Charges 130 yen for a 25 minute lesson, a veritable steal compared to online Caucasian instructors who charge at least 1,000 yen per hour. (Oh brother!)

Ripple Kids Park

• Started in November and is geared toward teaching children from the ages of 1 to 15.
• Instructors are also Filippino. RKP employs instructors with experience in internationals schools or working for American companies. (This makes them good?).
• RKP lessons cost 4,980 yen for one 25 minute lesson a week for a month. This works out to 1,300 yen per lesson. It sounds expensive but is still cheaper than actually going to a real school since more than one person can sit in front of the computer and attend the lesson at the same time.
• RKP says that price wars have already started but claims that other "schools" do business by preying on students unfamiliar with the eikaiwa racket business. For RKP, it's nothing but the best: professional, career-oriented instructors (Cough, cough, cough! Where have I heard that bullshit line before?), and RKP's goal is to carve out a niche in the "high end" online eikaiwa business.

I suppose it was only a matter of time before online eikaiwa took off. The technology is there for the taking. Even if the lessons were awful, people probably wouldn't feel too bad about losing a few hundred yen. How can you beat that price? Well, it's easy. You do it with quality. (Note to Gungun, its "copyright," not "Copy Right.")

Update 12/8: The Yomiuri has a nearly identical story. Is it Let's Feature Online Eikaiwa Schools Week in the newsrooms?

Rare Job, another online service with Filipino instructors, has attracted 17,000 registered users since launching two years ago.

The service offers four pricing plans, ranging from 3,000 yen to 8,000 yen. Lessons are available 9 p.m.-1 a.m. on weekdays, and 9 a.m.-noon on weekends. Each lesson lasts 25 minutes. They can be booked up to five minutes before a session is scheduled to begin.

Rare Job has about 8,000 instructors, who, it says, have been chosen from among students and alumni of the University of the Philippines, one of the country's most prestigious institutions.

Eigo de Syaberitai Club is yet another example. It features instructors who are currently teaching English to nonnative speakers at eight language schools in the Philippines.

To take these lessons, users pay their tuition via credit card or bank transfer, but they are not charged registration fees.

For students, affordability seems to be one of the most attractive features of these online lessons. They work out to a mere few hundred yen per hour, much cheaper than the few thousand yen per hour they could expect to pay for instructors from Britain or the United States.

But before you commit, you should always first take advantage of a trial lesson.

An LJ reader sent me this letter from his insurance company regarding the new immigration guideline which appears to confirm that the stance on the guideline has been softened. As the letter points out, not being enrolled in a public health plan is insufficient grounds for declining a visa renewal application. It looks like a lot of instructors can breathe a sigh of relief.

Update 11/28: Hoofin makes some salient points on this issue. The focus on Guideline 8 is misplaced in that it doesn't supersede the fact that the law still compels you or your employer to enroll in a national health plan while you are working in Japan. Instead of faxes from Diet members and comments from the Immigration Bureau, we should be seeking answers from the Health Ministry and Social Insurance Agency who have authority over this matter.

Update 12/7: Dmca.com has contacted Let's Japan and informed me that their client requested that this URL be taken down since I posted private and confidential correspondence intended for their client only. On that note, I've removed the letter from this post.

As you are aware, immigration guidelines are set to be changed next April so that you will have to show proof of enrollment in shakai hoken or kokumin kenko hoken when you apply to renew your visa. This is a huge issue for eikaiwa instructors as most are not enrolled in either health plan and are faced with the possibility of having to make hefty back payments upon enrollment.

This change might be on hold, though. According to Ronald Kessler, head of the Free Choice Foundation, which is campaigning for foreigners to be able to opt out of Japan's national health plans and buy their own private coverage, the revisions to the immigration guideline may be scrapped.

The Free Choice Foundation has just received word that an unpopular Immigration guideline is to be repealed.

The news was relayed via a phone call from the office of an Upper House lawmaker* immediately after he had spoken with the Justice Ministry regarding Immigration Guideline No. 8, the mandate that would have required visa applicants to present their social insurance ID cards at the application window. The lawmaker was informed that due to the large number of complaints registered - as well as the communiqué received from the Kobe City Assembly - the Ministry will be deleting (sakujo) Guideline No. 8 from the list of eight guidelines.

Kessler says that the Justice Ministry was overwhelmed by the resistance to the changes and decided to delete the guideline for the time being. No doubt a lot of instructors are going to be very relieved to hear this news.

(h/t ripslyme in the forums)