Nozomu Sahashi, the ousted president of NOVA Corp., was getting into some bunnies a bit different to the stuffed toy symbol of the struggling English conversation school chain, Sunday Mainichi (11/18) says.

Sahashi, 56, had decked out a secret room attached to the President’s Office at NOVA headquarters in Osaka’s Naniwa-ku with a Jacuzzi, sauna and double bed in a room decorated every bit as gaudily as the tackiest of love hotels.

Receiver Toshiaki Higashibatake opened the room to the media to show the world just how much Sahashi was using the publicly traded NOVA as his own personal company, including using the chain to fund the 70 million yen it cost to set up his secret love nest, as well as the 2.7 million yen a month in rent that came with it. NOVA was also forced to foot the bill for a similar love palace for the ex-president in Tokyo, all the while failing to pay thousands of its employees’ wages and rent.

“Former President Sahashi started using this (Osaka) office from about 2002,” a NOVA spokesman tells Sunday Mainichi.

From about the same time, NOVA’s finances began taking a turn for the worse. By its settlement of accounts at the end of March this year, it was 3.1 billion yen in debt. NOVA owes 4 billion yen in unpaid wages and has already received payment from students in the vicinity of 40 billion yen for lessons it has not yet provided. Sahashi, though, has no such money worries. In 2005, he took home an annual salary of 300 million yen. And last year also pocketed a pay packet of 150 million yen.

Sahashi had a liking for bunnies that went beyond the NOVA bunny he created to become the symbol of the company.

“He’d take a gorgeous secretary with him every time he went to some big meeting or party. He used secretaries who had once been top nightclub hostesses in Tokyo’s Ginza and Osaka’s Kita. They were all gorgeous women, every bit as attractive as showbiz idols or models,” a former NOVA executive tells Sunday Mainichi. “He had his favorite foreign teachers and picked out several women for serious relationships; I suppose that’s what he used to use the secret room in the president’s office for.”

In the early days of NOVA, back in the first half of the 1980s, Sahashi was apparently notorious for housing his hostess lovers in dormitories he had set up for foreign teachers at his company’s schools.

“He broke a lot of hearts, of both Japanese and foreign women,” says a resident of the area where Sahashi’s lovers used to be shacked up. “He used to get sick of women pretty quickly and would soon find new love. We were always hearing him screaming out in lover’s tiffs.”

Despite his failings, some within Japan’s McEnglish industry acknowledge Sahashi had his successes.

“He was certainly an ideas man,” an industry insider says. “At a time when the market rate for classes was 10,000 yen a lesson, he was able to provide classes for under 2,000 yen a pop, which really drew in customers. He was also a big supporter of youngsters, having employed lots and lots of very young teachers.”

Sahashi also oversaw NOVA as it grew from being a tiny Osaka conversation school that grew to become a nationwide chain far larger than any of its competitors. The NOVA bunny, in its early days at least, also proved to be a tremendous financial success for the company because of its outstanding merchandising sales, and was another Sahashi creation.

But the Osaka Prefecture native son of school teachers also received plenty of help along the way. One of the prime reasons was indirect government backing through a national program to encourage working people to study.

“This program subsidized 80 percent of the cost for those who decided to attend an English conversation school,” a business journalist tells the respectable weekly. “In effect, this was our tax money. Which means that taxpayers’ hard-earned cash was ending up in Sahashi’s pockets.”

As the NOVA empire crumbled around him and his board let loose with the ax, Sahashi was rumored to have fled overseas to avoid possible prosecution or retribution, but it appears he is actually still in Japan.

“According to a lawyer for the former president, he is spending his time traveling back and forth between Tokyo and Osaka,” a NOVA spokesman tells Sunday Mainichi. “We have still yet to be able to talk directly with him.”

http://mdn.mainichi.jp/culture/waiwai/face/news/20071109p2g00m0dm004000c.html

Having arrived in Tokyo from Seoul about a year ago, Il Yeong Eun, like many foreigners who come to Japan, soon encountered a major difficulty � housing discrimination.

Il, 25, together with two South Korean friends who also came to Japan around that time, visited three real estate agencies to rent an apartment in Shinjuku Ward. But the agencies turned them away because they were foreigners.

“I never expected to be refused,” said Il, who goes to a Japanese language school in the ward. “I felt like I was treated like a criminal.”

Fortunately, she found a one-bedroom flat through a real estate agency that one of her friends introduced her to. The firm’s South Korean employee takes care of foreign customers by teaching them Japanese customs related to living in rental apartments.

Japan’s foreign population is steadily increasing. Government data show the number of registered foreign residents stood at 2.08 million in 2006, up from 1.48 million a decade ago. Nonetheless, housing discrimination against foreigners is surprisingly strong even in Tokyo.

According to a 2006 survey conducted by Tokyo-based nonprofit organization Information Center for Foreigners in Japan, 94 percent, or 220 respondents, out of 234 foreigners in Tokyo who visited real estate agents said they were refused by at least one agent.

To ease the discrimination, the public and private sectors have gradually come to offer various services to help foreigners find properties.

The Land, Infrastructure and Transport Ministry launched the Web site Anshin Chintai (safe rental housing) in June to provide rental housing information and lists of real estate agents and NPOs that can support foreign apartment-seekers.

“We hear that some foreign residents have been refused (by landlords or rental agents),” said Eiji Tanaka, a ministry official in charge of the project. “The system is to network local governments, rental agents and nonprofit organizations” to effectively help such foreigners as well as the aged and the disabled.

So far, Tokyo, Fukuoka, Osaka and Miyagi prefectures and Kawasaki have joined the project. For example, 237 real estate agents in Tokyo are listed as supportive firms.

The site � www.anshin-chintai.jp � is available in Japanese only, but foreigners who have difficulties with the language can ask local governments to explain the information on the site to them, according to the ministry.

The ministry is trying to have other local governments join the system and is considering offering the content in other languages as well, the official said.

The Japan Property Management Association, involving about 1,000 real estate agencies, also launched the Web site Welcome Chintai � www.jpm.jp/welcome/ � in September to introduce rental properties in six languages � Chinese, English, Korean, Mongolian, Spanish and Russian.

Information about properties and procedures and customs to rent rooms are put up by rental agents on the site’s six blogs � one blog in each of the six languages.

“The Web site is a tool for us to smoothly accept foreign customers,” said Masao Ogino, chairman of the association’s international exchange committee that runs Ichii Co., the real estate agent in Shinjuku Ward.

As real estate agents that registered with the site write about their experiences of dealing with foreign customers, other member companies can gain knowhow, he said.

But opening such Web sites is not enough to help foreigners, said Toshinori Kawada, a Meiji University student who set up The-You Inc., a rental housing consulting firm, in Shinjuku Ward last year.

“(Foreigners) often find apartments through word of mouth. Distributing fliers at places where they gather is more effective” than offering information online, he said, noting his company’s site showing properties for foreigners, launched in July, has failed to draw many viewers.

A key to solving the housing problem faced by foreigners is to ease landlords’ anxieties about accepting them as tenants, Kawada said.

Landlords and rental agents often say they are concerned that foreign tenants might not have proper guarantors and might cause trouble with neighbors.

To ease such anxieties, his firm gives rental agents and landlords consultations on foreign tenant management, such as teaching them rules of everyday life here and collecting rents, by utilizing the expertise he gained by working at a foreign customers-only real estate agency for a year.

These private-sector moves have come as real estate companies and landlords think the rental housing market targeting foreigners has potential as Japan struggles with a declining birthrate.

“An oversupply (of rental apartments) makes it difficult (for landlords) to manage their properties. So they reluctantly turn to foreign customers,” Kawada said.

Ogino of the association said more and more real estate agents would enter the market as the association is trying to enlighten them and pass along knowhow to handle foreign customers through its new site.

“Our industry is finally moving toward internationalization as some agents now hire foreign employees,” Ogino said. “If real estate agencies can obtain knowhow to deal with foreign customers, they could gain more benefits and make foreign residents happy.”

http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/nn20071110f1.html

Failed English-language school chain Nova Corp. held briefings in Tokyo and Osaka on Friday for about 200 of the firm’s management-level employees, detailing the procedures required to gain reemployment with G.education Co.

Interviews for the firm’s employees wishing to work for G.education, based in Nagoya, which will take over Nova’s operation, were also conducted by Nova in Tokyo and Osaka the same day.

Nova will offer further interviews to about 4,900 nonmanagerial employees and foreign teachers on Saturday at about 20 locations.

http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/dy/national/20071110TDY02305.htm

For years Japan has welcomed English teachers such as Kristen Moon with open arms to fill its many language schools but when industry giant Nova collapsed they found themselves on their own.

Critics say the fiasco has exposed the lack of an adequate safety net for foreign workers in Japan, even as the world’s second-largest economy gradually opens its doors to overcome a shrinking workforce and an ageing population.

Moon arrived in Japan little more than six months before the nation’s largest foreign language school filed for bankruptcy protection last month, leaving thousands of foreign teachers without jobs or pay.

Concerned for her welfare, Moon’s students asked her to keep teaching them outside of the school and took her out for dinner and karaoke.

Their generosity almost made up for the problems, she said, while sipping a coffee at a cafe in Ichikawa, on the eastern outskirts of Tokyo.

“I feel my cultural contribution to Japanese society through the teaching of English is valued by individuals, but the government has exploited this need and led to companies earning huge profits,” she said.

Moon, a 23-year-old American, is one of about 4,500 foreign teachers left jobless after the collapse of the language school.

About 2,000 Japanese workers were also left without jobs while an estimated 400,000 students were affected.

Teachers’ hackles were raised further when local media showed the former Nova president’s plush executive suite at the company’s headquarters in Osaka complete with a dining room, bathroom with sauna and Japanese-style tea room.

The teachers, most of whom paid for their flights to Japan themselves and who find themselves without work or health insurance are now desperately trying to find new employment.

Some cannot afford a plane ticket home while others are offering individual lessons.

Despite the hardships, there is some hope for the teachers.

Nova’s lawyers said Tuesday that Japanese firm G.communication, which runs English classes in northern Japan, would start taking over the running of 30 Nova schools and try to manage up to 200, less than one-third of the total.

But, exhausted by anger and disappointment, some teachers are already packing their bags, giving up hope of getting the salaries they are owed.

“Because the company was telling us absolutely nothing, any new information was from the media, or from the union or gossiping amongst ourselves,” said Julie Pidgeon, 26, who plans to go home. “I was just sick of the limbo.”

Michelle Newton-Greene, 31, is also calling it quits.

“I’ve got to take some dignity home with me and start again,” she said.

Nova’s blue-and-yellow signs, which famously advertised an experience akin to “a study trip abroad”, are still dotted around Tokyo, but none of the hundreds of schools are open for lessons.

Teaching English was once a high-paying job in the country, drawing thousands of people from countries such as the United States, Britain, Canada and Australia, including many young people looking to spend a few years abroad.

As the Japanese economy stagnated in the 1990s and the yen became weaker, Nova began a more agressive teacher recruitment programme overseas, particularly through universities.

Moon said Japan’s laws need to be changed to make the country more welcoming to foreign workers.

She and her Australian colleagues feel that the collapse of Nova exposed lack of legal and social protection for foreign workers in Japan.

“Not just Nova staff but any foreign worker, whether they are Latin American construction workers or the women who make bento (lunch) boxes… they’ve all been exploited by their company,” Moon said.

“Often because there is a communication barrier and they cannot speak fluent Japanese, when something goes wrong, they are just fired. They don’t know the Japanese laws or the language and they are easily replaced.”

Japan has a tight immigration policy, restricting access to those with Japanese ancestors and skilled workers.

But with the population rapidly ageing and the birthrate dwindling, Japanese companies face a shortage of unskilled workers, which critics say has contributed to the exploitation of illegal foreign workers.

Goro Ono, a professor at Saitama University, said Japan has also been overly generous in granting work visas to Western English speakers and should have established better protection for teachers.

“If Nova had such a high risk of laying off foreigners, the government should have prepared for it with employment insurance,” he said.

“The question is, does Japan really want to host so many immigrants and have them as part of society?” he asked, adding that the answer was “no.”

Ono said teaching English in Japan was a type of immigrant labour. But Moon and her colleagues do not see themselves as the same as other immigrants.

“We can easily go back to our country whenever we choose,” said Moon, while Pidgeon added: “We are privileged. We are here by choice.”

http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5h25DO_2O_UNwdQdgDz1ayCy2-NxA