Ding, Dong the Wicked Witch Pink Bunny is Dead

Well, it has finally happened - the crooked, exploitive, madhouse I spent my first four years in Japan working at has finally come crashing down.

The place has been run like a mob-owned whorehouse pretty much since day one, but karma finally caught up with them this spring when a bunch of students complained to the government that the company was not living up to its promise that they could book lesson "anytime" and that when they tried to get a refund for their prepaid lessons, the company refused to give them a full refund. The trade ministry made them offer full refunds and forbid them to sell certain types of lesson contracts for a period. Since the company - the McDonalds of the language school industry in Japan - has been trying to triple its number of school over the last couple of years and has been spending money as fast as it came in the door on a variety of ill-advised projects and company jets for the president, this basically buggered the company's cash flow. Salaries were late in July, August and September for teachers and there was no pay in October. Many of the Japanese staff haven't been paid since mid summer.

The founder has been involved in a number of very dodgy stock deals to try to drum up enough cash to keep the wheels turning and aside from a bunch of really stupid faxes, has dropped out of sight since August. As more and more teachers stopped coming to work since they weren't getting paid, it became harder for students to book lessons and more and more asked for refunds.

Not that most of them have seen a single yen in refunds yet. Nova quit paying its bills months ago. Many of the teachers rent apartments from Nova, which sublets the units from landlords. The company has been deducting the rent from teachers paycheques, but hasn't been paying the landlords and as a result several hundred teachers have been turfed out of their homes in the last two months.

Nova employees glad to be off hot seat

The Yomiuri Shimbun

In the wake of Nova Corp.'s filing for court protection Friday, employees said that although they were anxious over their livelihoods, they were relieved to no longer have to cope with a barrage of complaints from students and teachers.

Nova, the nation's largest English-language school chain, applied for protection under the Corporate Rehabilitation Law with the Osaka District Court with debt of about 50 billion yen and suspended operations of all its schools.

Employees, mainly in their 20s, remained at their workplaces until the last moment, while many teachers had already stopped reporting to work over delays in salary payments. Lesson fees were also refunded to students who canceled their contracts with Nova. An employee in her 20s, who was manager of a branch in an office district in the Tokyo metropolitan area, said she began working for Nova after graduating from university as she wished to help people who wanted to learn English.

But she soon became dissatisfied with her position when she was instructed by the headquarters to try to get prospective students to sign lesson contracts.

As the number of branches increased around 2004 to 2005, more emphasis was placed on getting prospective students to sign contracts. In one case, one of the woman's colleagues was reprimanded for opposing a superior over the policy.

In June, when Nova was punished by the Economy, Trade and Industry Ministry over lesson contracts and cancellation problems, she believed that Nova would recover.

She heard that the police had to be called to another branch because a student had become angry to the point of violence, apparently over a lesson contract dispute, but the headquarters offered no assistance in the matter. "I still told myself that I should hang on as long as I was getting paid," she said.

Foreign teachers started not showing up for lessons in mid-September when their salary payments were delayed. Consequently, dozens of complaints poured in, creating chaos for the company's inexperienced receptionists. One staff member complained of not being able to afford food, while another had been reduced to tears every day before she finally collapsed and stopped coming to the office.

===

Stock speculators involved

OSAKA--A group of stock speculators charged by the Osaka District Public Prosecutors Office on suspicion of violating the Securities and Exchange Law, had been involved in a Nova capital expansion plan, the Yomiuri has learned.

The plan had been promoted by former Nova President Nozomu Sahashi, who was dismissed Thursday. Sahashi's financial problems may have led him to contact the group, as such groups control stock prices to gain illegal profits. Nova's court-appointed administrators stated that the move was grounds for Sahashi's dismissal.

According to sources, Sahashi had contacted the group led by Haruo Nishida, 57, an investment adviser who was arrested by the prosecutors on Oct. 12 on suspicion of manipulating the price of a construction company stock.

Nova announced on Oct. 9 it would issue stock warrants facilitating the purchase of 200 million new stocks, nearly three times the stock that had been issued, to two investment funds, with a view to securing about 6.4 billion yen. The funds are located in the Virgin Islands.

Nishida is said to have known people related to the investment funds and invited investors to Nova's plan before it was announced.

(Oct. 28, 2007)

The story above is very much the sanitized version of NOVA's flat out evil nature. Imagine the Bush administration running a chain of language schools in which people like Mike "Heckuva Job Brownie" Brown were the branch managers and Dick Cheney was in charge of the education department. Only with more evil, incompetence and general skullduggery and staffed by a lot of semi-literate Australians on working holidays.



For the real skinny on the whole sordid tale, the best "teachers gone wild" and "Freaky Student Stories" the best place to look is the forums at Lets Japan. Which is where I found all this art.

Ten steps
Yeah, its been posted elsewhere and its been around for six months but to paraphrase Atrios: Naomi speak, you listen

John Cleese gets political



A bit dated and UK specific toward the end, but I like his bit on extremism

New Zealand's gift to the world



If I had to choose between Flight of the ConChords,the All-Blacks and Steinlager, it would be a close race. Do yourself a favor and check out their other videos on YouTube.

I am no longer the whitest guitar player in the known universe
There's nothing wrong with this lesson, but I have to wonder how useful Hendrix chords are to someone who seems like he should be providing backing licks to the Mormon Tabernacle Choir

But would he meet with the new Premier of French Columbia, Heywood Jablomi?

So Fred Thompson finally took part in a Republican Canadiates debate and it didn't make much a difference It was all very ho-hum, though Mitt Romney and Rudy Gulliani took a few shots at each other. But what caught my eye was this bit from the CNN story on the debate:

"The former Tennessee senator survived a gotcha question, correctly identifying the prime minister of Canada as Stephen Harper."

A gotcha question? He wants to be president and asking him the name of the leader of one of the G-8 nations, the U.S. partner in Norad and NATO, the country's northern neighbour is a gotcha question? Talk about lowering the bar. What's next? Will they ask John McCain to name the three branches of government? or Gulliani how many states there are? May they'll ask Mitt Romney if he can find Utah on a map.

And another thing: This is typical of the double standard of the So-Called Liberal Media. Hillary Clinton is expected to put forth a universal health care system that will ensure absolute and total coverage for any and all ailments for every single American without it costing more than a couple of Big Macs a year and the plan must be handed in to the media in triplicate, double spaced and footnoted or she's failed to live up to expectations and is considered unworthy to lead. Barrack Obama, by virtue of the fact that he is half-African, is expected to solve or at least explain any and all issues connected to race in the United States or he is dodging the issue - oh and he has to be "black enough" to win over African-American voters without being "too black" and scaring off white suburbanites. John Edwards has mentioned poverty, but he's a wealthy self made man, so unless he has a ironclad plan approved by a panel of Republican economists to make everyone millionaires by the Thursday after election day, he's just a pretty boy who pays too much for haircuts. And since they all oppose the war in Iraq, they better all have a surefire plan to win the war, bring peace and prosperity to Baghdad and release terrorist-eating unicorns that shit gold bars throughout the Middle East otherwise they are siding with Osama Bin Laden.

Fred Thompson on the other hand drives a shiny red truck, can talk tough as a crime-fightin' lawyer on TV, knows the name of the country's next door neighbor and looks like every Middle American's dad. Now that's presidential!

On the other hand...life is good
Given the tenor of the previous post, you might think I'm depressed, pissed off, and annoyed with life in general. Nothing could be further from the truth, because I have finally realized my life-long goals of:

A) playing hockey (at least fictionally) for Team Canada

B)Being immortalized as a superhero in a comic book.

One of teachers at my son's after-school day care center has created a series of short comics featuring my kids and their friends. My son Nicholas has been portrayed as every hero from Spiderman to Zorro, but the latest edition features me.


More as soon as I get a chance to scan the whole thing in and get it translated, but the main title reads: "Nicholas's Family Battle" (sic) with the smaller text panels reading : "Canadian Ice Hockey" and "Whoops!!!"

Stay tuned!

Why we drink
This purpose of this post is partly to vent (isn't it always?) partly to inform, partly to show off my behind the scenes knowledge of big media, and partly to provide Dave (no, not that Dave, the other Dave) of photographic evidence of the fact that if it is drinkable (and sometimes even if it isn't) you can buy it in a can in Japan.

I had one of those "What the fuck am I doing here?" kind of days at the office today. What it comes down to is that I'm just plain getting tired of watching reality and the truth get slapped around the office like a pair of red-headed stepchildren who went on to become cheap crack whores. (oh yeah, one more purpose -- to see if my boss is spying on me)

We had a lengthy piece in the paper about the activities of the Japanese Navy, I mean the Maritime Self Defense Force (article 9 of the constitution says Japan can't have a navy, so all those AEGIS destroyers and the new pocket carrier are part of the Self Defense Forces, NOT the navy). Concerns are being raised by various peacenik NPOs and other "obvious troublemakers" intent on disturbing the national wa, that the MSDF may have broken the law that authorizes them to take part in Operation Enduring Freedom.

This is kind of a big deal in Japan, because despite their military alliance with the U.S. the government's interpretation of Article 9 is that while Japan has the right to collective self-defense (as all nations do under the UN charter) the constitution forbids the nation to exercise that right, just as it forbids the nation from maintaining armed forces.


let look at that pesky section of Japan's basic law:

ARTICLE 9. Aspiring sincerely to an international peace based on justice and order, the Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as means of settling international disputes.
第九条　日本国民は、正義と秩序を基調とする国際平和を誠実に希求し、国権の発動た 戦争と、武力による威嚇又は武力の行使は、国際紛争を解決する手段としては、永久にこ を放棄する。
In order to accomplish the aim of the preceding paragraph, land, sea, and air forces, as well as other war potential, will never be maintained. The right of belligerency of the state will not be recognized.
二　前項の目的を達するため、陸海空軍その他の戦力は、これを保持しない。国の交戦権 、これを認めない。

Here's the short version: Japan's Anti-Terrorism Law, passed in the wake of 9/11, empowers the SDF to provide logistical non-combatant support to Operation Enduring Freedom AKA the anti-terrorism efforts in Afghanistan. They are doing so by providing fuel to the multi-national naval flotilla that is engaged in an interdiction mission near the landlocked nation to ensure that Osama Bin Laden doesn't sneak out of the subcontinent in a zodiac or something like that.

The MSDF has pumped a lot of gas, much of it into supply ships belonging to other nations, which then went on to refuel combat ships belonging to those other nations. Japan is so scrupulous in observing the constitution that it will not permit the fighting ships of other nation to guard its tanker while it refuels other ships, which is why Japan has also sent a destroyer as part of the flotilla, which is only allowed to guard the other Japanese ships from the non-existent naval threat from landlocked Afghanistan. The thing is, one of the US supply ships "may have" gone on to refuel the aircraft carrier USS Kitty Hawk which then went on to engage in the early stages of the War in Iraq.

Ooops.

Forget for a moment that Japan sent non-combat troops to Iraq for a couple of years to show its loyalty to the United States to provide reconstruction aid in Southern Iraq under the (one-way) protection of the Dutch and later Australians and British. Apparently pumping gas for war is a no-no.

Now, I know what you are saying to yourself: "Aren't the MSDF pumpng gas for war in Afghanistan?" After all, Canada is part of that multinational naval flotilla in addition to having ground troops fighting and dying in Afghanistan--isn't there a war on there? Isn't Operation Enduring Freedom the Pentagon's name for the the War on Terror in Afghanistan? Isn't the civilized world at war with Al-Qaida and the Taliban?

Not according to the people I work for. As it was explained to me, the MSDF cannot take part in a war and since the MSDF is taking part in the international action against terrorism in Afghanistan, it cannot be a war.

Which bring us back to our title and the reason for my two little travelling companions on the train ride home.

It takes a noble man to win a Nobel Prize
Al Gore and Canada's own Sheila Watt-Cloutier are being touted as possible winners of the Nobel Peace Prize, but if it were up to me, it would go to Pete Seeger. Click here to sign the petition.

Ontario poised to embrace lack of democracy
According to the latest polling, the effort to improve Ontario's electoral system by adding proportional representation appears doomed:
The most recent SES/Sun Media poll indicates that the support to change Ontario's electoral system to MMP is unlikely to pass the 60% threshold needed for change.

Asked about their intentions related to the upcoming referendum, Ontarians generally preferred to keep the current system (47%), followed by voting for MMP (26%) and finally not casting a vote in the referendum (5%). Twenty-one percent were unsure.

At the same time, Liberal leader Dalton McGuinty appears to be headed to a slim majority with 43% of the vote as compared to 33% for the Conservatives, 17% for the NDP and 6% for the Greeens. So for all you Tories out that who intend to vote against MMP just remember you had your chance to fix the system so that when the Liberals don't get the majority of votes, they don't get to form a majority government.The next time the government does something you don't like, you are not allowed to complain that almost 60% of people voted against the government, because if you had used your head and voted for MMP, such a situation would be impossible.

Pass the salt...and the fire extinguisher
I can see the advertising campaign now "Our food is so spicy, they had to call out the fire brigade and evacuate the building." or "Our peppers are for eating, not spraying". I guess some in the land of bangers and mash just aren't ready for spicy Thai food. I've cooked some spicy chili over the years, but I've never had anyone call out the firefighters - the health department maybe, but not the fire department.

Please don't hit me with this olive branch

As regards the recent flame war that took place (mostly over at the Galloping Beaver) over my offhand use of a term (the fourth in George Carlin's infamous seven) sometimes used to describe the female genitalia and sometimes used to describe people who are dim, annoying and unpleasant, I would like to present this song by the brilliant Nellie McKay as a peace offering. Please, please, please listen to it in the tongue-in-cheek manner in which it is intended.

Getting a leg-up on Hallowe'en
This sounds like a script suggestion for the Trailer Park Boys, and I wouldn't be at all surprised if there was a trailer park involved somewhere along the line. You can almost hear the banjo music in the background (not that there is anything wrong with banjo music)

from the BBC:

North Carolina pair feud over leg
The leg was stored in a smoker after Mr Wood lost his homeA US man who stored his amputated leg in a barbecue smoker that was later auctioned off is locked in a custody dispute with the man who bought it.

but it gets weirder:

After buying the smoker last Tuesday, Mr Whisnant looked inside and found a man's leg wrapped in a wire screen. He initially gave the leg to the police, who concluded it had not been removed as a result of a crime and sent it to a funeral home until Mr Wood could pick it up. But after making money by charging adults $3 (£1.47) and children $1 (49p) to look inside the empty smoker, Mr Whisnant asked for it back. His request was refused by the funeral home, so he decided to try to persuade Mr Wood to share custody and profits.

"I told him I'd share custody of it..." Mr Whisnant said.
"It's a strange incident and Halloween's just around the corner. The price will go up if I get the leg."

Expect to see these people throwing chairs at each other on Jerry Springer very, very soon.

Sometimes you can't even make a joke



And it isn't just the mangled utterences of the preznit, it is also stuff like the lifework of comic evangelistic nutjob Jack Chick that can also offer "found" comedy.

High School of the Americas
In case you don't read Jesus' General (and if not, why not? Are you some sort of pinko subversive?) you may have missed his letter in response to this this article. Both are must reads. I can't even take credit for the title of this post, it belongs to the General, whom you should get down on your lousy stinking knees and thank (in a purely manly, heterosexual way, of course) --I am but his vessel.

A tale of two elections
With only 11 days to go until the Ontario election, John Tory seems to have been hoisted by his own petard. He tried to go the Karl Rove route and "energize the base" by pandering to religious fundamentalists and promising to fund their schools. He managed to chase away the remaining Bill Davis Tories and non-ideologues, most of whom will now either stay home on election day, or worse (for Tory) hold their collective nose and vote for the Liberals.

Liberal Premier Dalton McGuinty, who entered the campaign more or less even with John Tory, has done the smart thing and A)Connected Tory to Mike Harris whenever possible, B) Pointed and laughed at Tory over the religious school funding question and C) otherwise kept his mouth shut. It has been a winning strategy, as far as it goes.

If Howard Hampton can convince blue-collar industrial workers worried about job losses to vote in their own interest and back him instead of a corporate shill, the NDP could pick up some seats in the 905 zone around Toronto.

As the campaign come into the home stretch, the Liberals are widening the gap in their lead over the Tories and it looks like another Liberal government, perhaps even a majority.

On the electoral reform front, according to the Star, people are at least becoming more aware that there is a referendum and what it is about. According to the linked article from last week's paper, 6 in 10 voters now at least know about the referendum, up from a paltry 8 percent in June. What's more, 40% of them claim to understand the MMP system (a feat no more difficult than counting to ten with your hands behind your back) compared to the 54% who claim to understand our current system (a feat that ranks with counting to ten on your fingers and getting it right the second time.)

Accord to an Angus Reid poll taken two weeks ago, support for the MMP was at 26%, with 33% backing the current system and 38% undecided. Since MMP needs 60% to pass, things are not looking good.

A more recent poll published in the Mop&Pail reveals that while only a little more than half of voters claim to know anything about Mixed Member Proportional representation, those that do know something about it are slightly more likely to vote in favour of it than vote against it. Which is nice, but the bar to pass the change to MMP requires a 60% supermajority, with at least half the votes in 60% of the ridings. I am not optimistic that good sense will win out and we will have a change, but its never too late to shill, so all you Ontario readers get out there and vote early and often for MMP.

In terms of a possible federal election Stephane Dion, having not exactly proven himself a firebrand thus far, might be well advised to follow McGuinty lead: point out all the thing that the Harper government promised, but has not delivered (start here: Remember those 125,000 day care spaces he promised by 2010? so far zero progress); Link Steverino to his buddy George W. Bush as often as possible and point out all the egregious overreaches that have pissed non-conservatives off (the softwood sellout, sidelining Status of Women Canada, trying to back out of Kyoto, failure to set a date to leave Afghanistan, undermining of democracy through appointment of unelected cabinet ministers and 'local go-to people" etc etc etc) and sit back and let Stephen and Doris and Petey shoot themselves in the foot with every new promise and otherwise keep his mouth shut.
The Liberals and the Cons are neck and neck now. Harper thinks he can out campaign Dion, but I think a little campaign judo will allow Dion to eke out a minority government. Harper can't run as an untested opposition leader now,　he's an unlikeable incumbent stuck defending his woeful record to an unimpressed populace. Plus there's that whole baby eating thing.

Game on!

Ontario is already going to the polls in October, but it looks like we may be facing a winter election in the Great White North. I guess Steverino thinks that its time to strike while the iron is hot in Quebec.

Clowns for all seasons
St. Thomas More, the man for all seasons, was entirely correct when he said "The devil, that proud spirit, cannot endure to be mocked"
Not bad for a bunch of clowns. As there may be a problem with the link, here's the whole thing from Neatorama

Here’s an excellent example of pwnage: when the white supremacist group VNN Vanguard Nazi/KKK tried to host a hate rally in Knoxville, Tennessee, they were foiled by … clowns!

Unfortunately for [VNN] the 100th ARA (Anti Racist Action) clown block came and handed them their asses by making them appear like the asses they were.

Alex Linder the founder of VNN and the lead organizer of the rally kicked off events by rushing the clowns in a fit of rage, and was promptly arrested by 4 Knoxville police officers who dropped him to the ground when he resisted and dragged him off past the red shiny shoes of the clowns. http://www.volunteertv.com/home/headlines/7704982.html

“White Power!” the Nazi’s shouted, “White Flour?” the clowns yelled back running in circles throwing flour in the air and raising separate letters which spelt “White Flour”.

“White Power!” the Nazi’s angrily shouted once more, “White flowers?” the clowns cheers and threw white flowers in the air and danced about merrily.

“White Power!” the Nazi’s tried once again in a doomed and somewhat funny attempt to clarify their message, “ohhhhhh!” the clowns yelled “Tight Shower!” and held a solar shower in the air and all tried to crowd under to get clean as per the Klan’s directions.

At this point several of the Nazi’s and Klan members began clutching their hearts as if they were about to have a heart attack. Their beady eyes bulged, and the veins in their tiny narrow foreheads beat in rage. One last time they screamed “White Power!”

The clown women thought they finally understood what the Klan was trying to say. “Ohhhhh…” the women clowns said. “Now we understand…”, “WIFE POWER!” they lifted the letters up in the air, grabbed the nearest male clowns and lifted them in their arms and ran about merrily chanting “WIFE POWER! WIFE POWER! WIFE POWER!”

A hat tip to Cowboys for Social Responsibility, second home of the Ponoka police blotter.

Death to all violent extremists!
I agree with Pete King, but not in the way he might think.
He says:There are too many mosques. Imagine the shitstorm that would ensue if one were to replace "mosques" and "muslims" in his remarks with "churches" and "christians" or "synagouges" and "jews." Personally, I think we have too many of all three, especially of the fundementalist sorts, who refuse to cooperate with the state, send their children to public schools or abide by the law of the land regarding tolerance for those whose lifestyles or beliefs they disapprove of. Freedom of religion includes freedom from religion so quit knocking on my door to try to get me to take a copy of the Watchtower when I'm too hungover sleepy to argue with you. And stop trying to get the secular state to teach your addled, scientifically comic notions of where we come from alongside accepted, rational, emperical science. Believe what you like at home, but keep it to yourself, 'nuff said?
If there is one thing I can't stand, it is intolerance.

Listen and repeat: Karma's a bitch, ain't it?

Branch closings dim Nova's future
The Yomiuri Shimbun
English-conversation school operator Nova Corp.'s planned closure of about 50 branches at the end of this month is indicative of the severe business climate the company faces, following a number of student contract cancellations and an order from the government in June to partially suspend its operations.
The firm, the largest of its kind in the nation, has delayed paying some foreign teachers' salaries.
Nova plans to reduce costs by cutting personnel after the branch closures are completed. However, Nova's prospects remain uncertain.
According to the company, Nova had 418,000 students as of March 31, a more than 10 percent drop from the same time last year, due to former students filing a series of high-profile suits demanding the firm refund their tuition fees after they canceled lesson contracts.
Nova has also been hampered by a decline in the number of new students, following the Economy, Trade and Industry Ministry's order in June to partially suspend its operations.
Nova listed revenues of 9.2 billion yen from April to June in fiscal
2007, a 31.9 percent drop from the same period last year. The firm had an after-tax deficit during the same period of 2.4 billion yen.
The firm's delay in salary payments to some foreign teachers has caused a great deal of anxiety. "I'm worried about what's going on," a foreign Nova teacher in Osaka said.

Lesson plan for level four advanced students
Target Language: Use of tags for emphasis and as interogatives.
Intro: Discuss students' past experience with renewing lesson packages and using all point before contract expiration. (Alternative: Speculation "What would you do if this school closed?" "What would you do if your company failed to pay your salary?"
Drills: Listen and repeat - Nova has had some problems lately, haven't they?
Nova has been cheating its students, haven't they?
Nova hasn't paid its teachers this month, have they?
Substitution drill: This school is in a fiery tailspin/up shit creek without a paddle/ neck deep in the big muddy, isn't it? (explain idioms as needed, get students to speculate on possible meanings or supply own metaphors)
This was only a matter of time/bound to happen/simple karma wasn't it?
This school is run by thieves/wankers/the yakuza, isn' t it?
Role play: A Nova teacher has not been paid and has no money. They are complaining to a Nova manager and demanding their money. The manager must come up with excuses not to pay (ie: the ministry of consumer affairs ate our account books, didn't they? The corporate jet needed repairs, didn't it?) and the teacher must come up with examples of what will happen to them or to the manager if they aren't paid. (ie: I'll be thrown out of my apartment, won't I? You don't think you'll get away with this, do you?)

(see if you can guess where I used to work and how I liked it)