Year of the Dog's Weblog

“We would like you to work in Mukanata next school year.
Your schools are Kato JHS, Kato ES and Genkai ES. You can walk to Kato JHS and ES from Akama station. To get to Genkai ES you can take bus from Togo station.
232,000 yen per month is provided except for August. So is transportation expenses up to 15,000 yen per month.
We will show you the actual contract at the meeting on 24th.
If you have some questions, please contact me.”

Con: Here is what is wrong with this contract. First they gave me a school that is really far away. It is so far in fact that there aren’t that many regular buses to catch. If I miss the one bus that I need I will be late and I will be docked half a day’s pay. I’m not late very often, but if circumstances should arise I don’t believe I should be docked half a day’s pay when legal according Japanese labor standards the max they are allowed to dock is a maximum of %10 of a days pay. Just another way they try to stick it to foreigners because most are unfamiliar with the laws here in Japan. Next I asked for a raise of 10,000 yen. It is a fairly standard raise in Japan for completing a contract, but of course they didn’t give it to me. Also we don’t get bonuses. Everyone who works at the public schools in Japan gets a bonus, except us foreigners. Some bonuses in Japan can be as high as 5 months worth of pay and as low as 2 months worth of pay. Not too shabby for Japanese employees. You also notice in the e-mail I was sent that we don’t get paid for the month of August. The board of education pays my company OWLS for that month, but it just collects the money and tells us that we don’t get paid then, because there is no work, but this is a lie on their part. This a common practice at this company I work at. Anything to squeeze a dime out of us.  There is no chance for promotion in my company and no chance for any significant kind of raise. Something else I just found out this morning. As you’ll notice in the letter there is a 15,000 cap or travel expenses. Well we have to fill out a travel expense form every month. The board of education pays OWLS for all our travel expenses. There is no limit. Whatever we fill out on the form OWLS gets paid. Basically OWLS is getting everything over 15,000 yen.  I had a friend who had to pay nearly 40,000 yen to commute to his schools. He was only reimbursed for 15,000 yen and OWLS gets 25,000. Sounds pretty shady to me. We have monthly meetings and if we don’t attend them, we are docked 4,000 yen. However we don’t get paid anything for attending them after our regular working ours. And don’t even get me started on paid and unpaid holidays with this company. Don’t try and take a day off without filling out a form first. Even in cases of family emergencies. A friend who works at the company told me that a friend of his died and he wanted to attend the funeral. The company had the nerve to ask who died and they wanted some kind of proof. It’s not any business of theirs. A personal day is a personal day.

PRO: The kids and the teachers at the schools are very nice and you can have many interesting experiences working in Japanese public schools. You get public holidays and weekends off. You can improve your Japanese by working in a Japanese environment.

It’s not a very enticing deal for me anymore. I originally signed with this company because I was desperate for a job because my former company, NOVA, went bankrupt and I had to make rent on my new place. Now that I’m settled in my place and earned the level 2 of the Japanese language proficiency test, I don’t think I need to stay with this company. And if anyone from my company is reading this, you most definitely understand why. It’s time for me to move onto bigger and better things. I will make something of myself. There are opportunites in Japan for those who are willing to go after them.

Pleae take a look at my online shop at www.cafepress.com/gorillaskin