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Watching them watching us
‘Fingerprint Day’ adds insult to injury for Japan’s foreign community From July 3 to 11, 2005, U.N. special rapporteur Doudou Diene visited Japan to assess the factors of discrimination that affect a variety of minority groups in this country. In his final report, he recommended that the Japanese government should “avoid the adoption of any…
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Starting today, ‘gaijin’ formally known as prints
Today sees the introduction of a law requiring the majority of foreigners entering Japan to be fingerprinted and photographed. This change has been met with howls of protest from foreign residents and the foreign media, who have pointed to the fact that the only terrorist attacks on Japanese soil have been carried out by Japanese.…
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Nova boss lived in cloud-cuckoo-land
“The superintendent at my apartment says to me, ‘Your rent is three months overdue; I’m afraid I’ll have to ask you to leave,”‘ says Adele, who came from France six months ago to teach at Nova. “So I did a frantic Net search and found a place charging ¥40,000 a month. One six-mat room in…
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Ex-President Sahashi claims he is victim of NOVA crash
Ousted NOVA Corp. President Nozomu Sahashi told the Sunday Mainichi in an exclusive interview — the first he has given since the collapse of the English conversation chain — that “before I apologize to everybody, I want to get NOVA back on its feet.” Sahashi, 56, vanished from public view as NOVA struggled throughout the…
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Hungry Nova teachers teach for food
A labor union representing former teachers at failed Nova Corp. launched a program Saturday that enables students to pay for language lessons by buying them meals instead of paying tuition fees. Nova has closed its schools nationwide, depriving nearly 300,000 students of classes and keeping the teachers out of work and pinched for money. At…
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Worried NOVA students crowd into Osaka hall for meeting
The NOVA Students’ Association held its first meeting here on Friday, with many students appearing worried as they listened to the explanations about the company. About 1,000 participants poured into a hall in Osaka with a capacity of about 250, prompting the sponsor of the meeting to quickly find another location. The group was formed…
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G.education officially takes over NOVA
Preparatory school operator G.education has officially taken over NOVA, the failed operator of Japan’s largest English conversation school chain, company officials said. The takeover took effect after a representative for G.education and receivers for NOVA signed an agreement on the handover on Tuesday. Osaka-based NOVA filed for court protection from creditors under the Corporate Rehabilitation…
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New NOVA school opens
A company that has taken over NOVA Corp., the failed English school chain, has opened a new school here, company officials said. G.education, based in Nagoya, remodeled its “EC” English school as a NOVA school and opened it near Nagoya Station in Nakamura-ku. The company will hold meetings for NOVA students and new students on…
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‘Gaijin card’ checks spread as police deputize the nation
In the good old days, very few Japanese knew about Alien Registration Cards ? you know, those wallet-size documents all non-Japanese residents must carry 24/7 or face arrest and incarceration. Back then, a “gaijin card” was only something you had to show a bored cop doing random racial profiling on the street. Legally, in fact,…
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The takeover of Nova
The court-appointed trustees of Nova Corp. have given up trying to rehabilitate the nation’s largest language-school chain and have chosen a Nagoya-based company to take over part of Nova’s business. Although the trustees’ quick decision suggested that a business solution was at hand and the new company says it will “basically hire” all Nova teachers…