The Explosion Of Nova

There used to be a pretty blonde girl behind the counter through the window in front of the ticket stand. I’d momentarily admire her beauty before popping my changes into the ticket booth. Once she looked up. She smiled. I smiled back. She sort of became a staple of my teaching week at this particular school. She was another foreigner out there and though I’d never speak to her it was a comfort to know there was a smile should she see me, a small connection between two strangers in a strange land. Today there would be no smile, no blond girl and there wouldn’t even be a counter. Instead there was a gray, steel shutter pulled over the window and behind it a room collecting dust. Hundreds of places just like this one appeared country wide virtually overnight, empty rooms where once worked dozens of Japanese and foreigners, now victims of a company crushed by the weight of greed. A pillar of Japan’s big four has fallen and people like that pretty blonde girl are still trying to dig themselves out of the rubble that once was Nova.

When last I wrote of the ill fated Nova Corporation they were in the process of closing about 200 area schools leaving many out of work and students out in the dirt, their time invested in their Nova based English education incomplete. To recap, Nova worked on a points system. You purchase points that you trade in for lessons. The problems arose when people who had purchased points decided they no longer wanted to participate in Nova lessons or had to cancel out of lesson. Many of these folks were not granted refunds or not granted full refunds for reasons buried under a mound of Nova bureaucracy and red tape. People sued. People Won. Nova’s image was tainted by an unforgiving media portrayal of them. Because of this business restrictions were placed on the company, money was lost and Nova started to close schools. They were in financial perial at the time I wrote my original Nova post but the company was trying to hide just how bad it was. Calls for the CEO to resign fell on deaf ears. Things could not be buried for long. In September Nova began to hold up payments to staff. It was reported that possibly 3,000 employees were not being paid. Some were owed thousands. Employees began to band together threatening to walk off the job should they not be probably paid for their work. Others all in out quite seeing that this ship was sinking. What transpired next was nothing short of rampant paranoia. Everybody feared an ax was coming down. Teachers living together in Nova apartments held nightly discussions on what the coming weeks could yield. Students and parents also became fearful of school closes. With 200 already closed down could they be next. With jobs and lessons on the line there was a dark cloud lingering over everybody attached to Nova. There were pickets of protest outside of Nova offices. Despite promises of the storm passing, near the end of September nothing had changed and staff were still unpaid. Nova sent a FAX to offices stating that September payments would now not be issued. The FAX did mention a sort of compromise but whatever this was wouldn’t see the light.

Nova collapsed in a heap of dust and ash on October 26th when, siting a 43.9 billion yen debt, the company filed for bankruptcy. Company president and founder Nozomu Sahashi was dismissed from his position and quietly vanished into the night. Over night every Nova school was ordered to close all 1000+ schools leaving 420,000 students without lessons and about 7,000 foreign staff out of work. Though there would a small ray of light for Nova, at the time people looked at the ruins and wondered how once a might giant, the biggest of the big four English schools in Japan, could have crumbled so. Most pointed to corporate greed. A blogger stated that it was “hard to imagine any other event which could cause as much disrupt to the foreign population in Japan short of a war or Government meltdown”. I thought of a friend of mine who had left the company I work for for what she believed would be smoother sailing and sunnier skies with Nova out in Okinawa. Only weeks after she began she was now out of work, her future in Japan questionable. She was not alone. There were thousands like her. The remaining three of the big four (along with smaller companies like my own) braced themselves for not only an torrent of Nova teachers wanting jobs but also a torrent of Nova students wanting lessons. The government started to lightly prod other schools into accepting staff and students as the industry goes into damage control. I was told yesterday that 60 new teachers had just been hired and one can assume that all outside of the country hiring has been placed on hold with so many here needing work. Although it has not yet been announced that schools will be opening up new classes it is expected. Those wonderful offices days where one could spend five hours on nothing are believed to soon be transformed into full lesson days as are those days where you work schedule equates to only being an hour in length. As Dylan once sang, my friends, the times they are a changin’. Shortly after this announcement I received an email from the Canadian Embassy in Tokyo offering support to Nova teachers who may be lingering about Japan jobless. In similar offers of support, the Australian and British Embassies are providing assistance to unpaid Nova teachers. Airlines, swamped by jobless teachers needing to return home, have offered discounts to accommodate.

And now, in the aftermath, the dust is settling. Teachers and students are moving on and the other big three, as well as smaller English schools, are moving up. And what of Nova? They, too, are starting to rebuild…with a little help. G.communication is a cram school company based out of Nagoya. Last week they announced that they are taking over partial operations of Nova schools and will be opening up at least 30 schools within the next few months with plans to top off at around 200 in the future. However questions are already being raised primarily dealing with the reputation of G.communications and its willingness to enter into such a unstable endeavor. Will people still trust the Nova name? I guess time will tell. The treading on the dirt road that once was a mighty highway is going slowly. If anything can be learned from this it is that corporations, no matter how powerful, can be felled by their own doing. Lies and greed are not foundations to build upon. Nova is learning that and its collapse, not any verdict passed down by the court in the past year, is the real justice that has been served. Sadly, such justice had to be passed at the expense of so many others. Nova joins the ranks of Enron and WorldCom and now serve not as pillars of flourishing industry but as bastions of greed and lies. Maybe the more light that is shone on such rats the more the earth turning corporate conglomerates will realize that they are not infallible nor are they indestructible. And to the pretty blonde girl behind the counter…I hope you haven’t be marred too badly by all this and that out there, somewhere, you are still managing to smile.