"Where else would you go when you have an ax to grind?"

Showing posts with label Nova. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Nova. Show all posts

Thursday, October 01, 2009

A different kind of private lesson

When I worked for NOVA, it was pretty clear that the way the company made money was by lending students the money to buy lesson packages from the school at usurious rates of interest. There were always rumors that the company president, when he and his brother parted company over their first language-teaching firm, had gone to the Yakuza for the money to start up what became NOVA. I'm guessing that might have been more than just a rumor and that maybe the teachers and students weren't the only ones who got stung.

2 gangsters held over holding of ex-Nova boss

Two members of the Yamaguchi-gumi crime syndicate were arrested on the spot Monday on suspicion of confining the former president of the failed language school chain Nova Corp. inside a Tokyo hotel, police said.

According to senior police officials, the two men confined Nozomu Sahashi, 58, who has been sentenced to 3-1/2 years' imprisonment for professional embezzlement, inside a room of a hotel in Chuo Ward, Tokyo, from about 11:30 a.m. to 3 p.m. Monday.

On the same day at about 3 p.m., investigators rescued Sahashi and arrested the two men. Sahashi, who is currently appealing the ruling, did not suffer any injury.

(Sep. 30, 2009)
If the mobsters had only had the presence of mind to sell tickets to former teachers for their little chat with Mr. Sahashi, they could have gotten back all their money in one fell swoop by selling out Toyko Dome at 500 yen a seat. (I'm sure there are still a few veterans who remember being paid, in cash, the first and only bonus NOVA ever paid its teachers - a nice, shiny 500 yen coin to mark the new millenium - I think I bought a beer and pack of cigarettes with mine)

Wednesday, August 26, 2009

Karmic wheel turns



Oh the sweet, sweet schadenfreude!

Ex-Nova president sentenced to 3 1/2 years for embezzling
OSAKA — The founder and former president of English conversation school operator Nova Corp, Nozomu Sahashi, was sentenced Wednesday to three years and six months in prison without suspension for embezzling 320 million yen in Nova’s employment benefit funds.

The Osaka District Court rejected the claim by the 57-year-old that he is not guilty or should receive a suspended sentence as he had no intention to gain profits nlawfully. Prosecutors had asked for a five-year prison term.The ruling said Sahashi embezzled the accumulated employment benefit fund by transferring it to a bank account of a Nova subsidiary on July 20, 2007.

Sahashi admitted during trial proceedings that he used the money to reimburse language lesson fees people paid before terminating their contracts.‘‘There is no room for leniency in the defendant’s practice of using accumulated employment benefits to address the financial crisis while having no certain prospects of returning them,’’ said Presiding Judge Hiroaki Higuchi.The defense counsel for Sahashi said that the court did not give sufficient explanation against their argument, while declining to comment on whether they will appeal the sentence.

Aside from the criminal case, Sahashi faces several lawsuits that have been filed by employees who lost their jobs without receiving salaries, and students who got no refunds since Nova went bust in October 2007.In the latest case, a bankruptcy administrator filed a damages suit on Aug 19, seeking 2.1 billion yen in compensation for breach of trust, claiming Sahashi purchased equipment used for remote English lesson services against Nova’s business plan.

Coincidently, the sentence is almost the same amount of time I served working for that bent, moneygrubbing, thieving douchebag.
If there is any justice in this world, Sahashi will serve his entire sentence in a 6-foot by 6-foot poorly lit and unventilated glass room furnished with a round table 4 feet across and four folding chairs. A doorbell will chime every 40 minutes and a trio of guards will come in, demand to know why he came to prison, declare that their hobbies are "sleeping, driving, going to shopping and cleaning the room" and then either mutter incoherently, ask deeply personal questions about his sex life or impart deeply personal, often frightening personal information of their own, such as "I strangled my child's pet," "I think I might be bisexual," "I use a mirror to look up high school girls' skirts on the train" and the ever-popular "I've stopped taking the medication they gave me at the psychiatric clinic." At least one of the three guards should have breath that would peel paint and another should be in serious need of a bath. The third should make a point of coughing in Sahashi's face as much as possible. At least once a day, a four-year-old should be brought into cell to punch Sahashi in the scrotum and then scream non-stop at the top of its lungs for 40 minutes.
And he should have to wear a tie all day, every day, no matter how hot or humid it is - and no unbuttoning the collar. Ever.
And even then, the lying, larcenous, smug, arrogant shit-eating weasel still owes me six months as far as I'm concerned. I think everyone who ever worked for Nova or was ever a student at Nova should get a gift certificate good for one free opportunity to kick Sahashi in the yarbles.

(Note: This is a reposting from memory of the original post that was eaten by blogger when I tried to spellcheck it a few hours ago. It may vary slightly from the original posting put up last night)

Wednesday, March 12, 2008

A shitty way to learn a language
When I first came to Japan, I came to teach English at a chain of school that was to linguistics what Mickey D's is to haute cuisine. Nova talked a good game, but their real selling point was that they had the lowest prices if you bought enough lessons at once and had schools at every station, which means they are thicker on the ground in a city like Tokyo or Osaka than Tim Horton's in Toronto. They were the biggest employers of foreigners in the country with hundreds of schools and thousands of employees.
It was very much a place ruled by moronic policy manuals and systems designed to squeeze as much money out of customers as possible and there is little good to be said about it. At least I wore a necktie instead of a hairnet, but if you weren't in the glass-walled closet classroom kissing ass flirting entertaining teaching a group of one to three Johns suckers students, or trying to get toddlers to stop punching you in the nuts crying for their mommy being scared of the big pale-skinned blue-eyed giant learn English, you were expected to be in the parlour Voice room kissing ass flirting sarcastically abusing shaking your moneymaker entertaining facilitating English communication among the waiting psychopaths, suckers, random strangers and mental patients off the the street and no I'm not exaggerating students. 

Too make an already too long story shorter, NOVA corkscrewed in for a landing last fall thanks to the sleazy, grasping fuckery of its president and owner, throwing thousands of young foreign teachers out of work after not paying them for a month or more. Suffice to say if this man were to walk into the wrong bar today, he'd get his ass kicked until his nose bled, but I digress.
This week I finally found out what happened to all the lame textbooks the schools had been using since the early 1980s



For those who can't make out the label, this is Let's study English! toilet paper.