So the other day, Nova collapsed. The whole company… it was the biggest foreigner employer in Japan — there are now 4000 foreigners without work in Japan, and most of them haven’t been paid since September. There’s also something like 6-8000 Japanese staff that are now out of work. That’s a huge number of people to just lose their jobs with no pay!

Nova had been having financial trouble for a while, but they continued to dig themselves deeper and deeper into a hole — hiring more and more teachers that they couldn’t pay for, defaulting on apartment leases, taking out too many loans, false advertising, not having teachers available for students, and then refusing to refund students who bought lessons but had no teachers.

To think, I had applied there in the spring, but thanks to advice from former foreign language teachers (and former English language school students from Japan) — all people whom I met through the JASGP — I went with Aeon. The feeling I got during the interview with Aeon was also much better than with Nova, but I’m really happy for all the advice I got back home.