Nova Pocky

There are some people who are absolutely crazy for Pocky (essentially an unsalted pretzel stick dipped in chocolate) but I'm not one of them. I think they're inoffensive but not especially appealing so I don't buy them regularly. Once in awhile, they will release a variety that I'll sample (like coconut) but it's quite rare.

While I was shopping at a local market today, I ran across Pocky with Nova conversation schools' ugly usagi (rabbit) mascot on the box. I'm not sure what compelled Nova to go with such a poor design but the Japanese supposedly went pretty crazy about it and collected items made in this thing's likeness. The company I used to work for was sold to an off-shoot of Nova two years before I stopped working there and our salespeople would get bugged by the clients they were trying to sell to for free Nova usagi collectibles. I also heard that on-line auctions offered stuffed usagi and whatnot which sold for an attractive amount of money.

Personally, I've always called this the "beak bunny" because the face looks like a chicken beak has been planted in the middle of a rabbit's face. Of course, the point is for the nose/mouth combo to look like a smiley face but it just looks weird. Nonetheless, I was intrigued enough to pick up this box of Pocky to see how Nova was linking to Pocky.


The two packets inside the box each have a drawing of the mascot and an English phrase with a Japanese translation. I guess the idea is to get people to study English on their snack packages. It's probably targeted toward kids for the most part. Though adults do enjoy Pocky, I think the notion that they'd study the packets is a bit far-fetched.


On the back of the box, another chocolate product made by Glico (the company that makes Pocky) is mentioned as part of the Nova campaign. GABA is a chocolate product which claims to help improve "mental balance". This chocolate includes Gamma-Amino Butyric Acid (hence the name GABA) which is supposed to soothe the nervous system. I guess Nova hopes to reach the kids via Pocky and the adults through GABA.

One thing I wondered is how much Nova had to fork over for this advertising campaign and if it all seems pretty ill-timed on the heels of the bad publicity they are getting over a handful of their teachers being arrested for drug possession. I also wonder how well this sort of marketing works to draw people into language schools.

Valentine's Day, Japan-style

The gift and card pictured above were a Valentine's treat given to my husband by one of his more generous female students. Inside, there's a gold box of chocolate truffles made in France. If you know anything about the way things work during the Valentine's holiday in Japan, you know this isn't an indication of any amorous intent on the student's part.

For those who don't know, the confectioners in Japan performed a profitable King Solomon act on the holiday and split it into a holiday in which men receive chocolates as gifts (Valentine's Day) and one in which women receive cookies or marshmallow-based treats or other white sweets (White Day). What's more, the chocolate gifts that men receive are usually based on mundane friendships or business relationships rather than romance. Female workers give chocolate to their male colleagues in many cases.


The chocolate women tend to give isn't elaborate for the most part. You find that women in offices tend to buy pre-wrapped tidbits of relatively pedestrian chocolates from convenience stores or supermarkets. Strawberry or cherry Kit-Kats are a particular favorite. This year there is a special Valentine's box of brandy and orange Kit-Kats for sale. In fact, I've never seen the heart-shaped boxes of candy that are frequently sold in the U.S. at this time of year. The truffles my husband received are definitely several cuts above the usual fare.

Most of the Japanese women I've spoken to about this are not fond of the way this works. I've been told that White Day is frequently forgotten and their Valentine gifts of chocolate are not reciprocated.

My husband also read a book quite some time ago (I wish I could remember the title) about the politics and psychology of Japanese office ladies (frequently called "O.L.s") and it mentioned that a lot of women use this holiday as a means of expressing some hostility toward their bosses. Besides spitting in the tea they served, they'd also carefully break apart all the chocolate inside it's wrapper before giving it over to their boss or coworker.

Surprisingly, the conservative, old-fashioned former president of my former company (he reigned for 10 years of my 12 there) was savvy enough to outlaw the giving of chocolate during Valentine's Day. He didn't want to impose the hardship of buying a bunch of pointless little gifts on what he knew were our greatly underpaid O.L.s.

To Web Cam or Not to Web Cam

image lifted from Amazon U.S.

My husband and I recently purchased a web cam so his family can see him when he talks with them via Skype. After considerable amounts of research, we decided on a Creative Labs Ultra notebook camera which is a tiny little thing that clips onto a laptop display.

Despite the fact that it was relatively cheap (about $70 from Amazon in the U.S. or Japan) the camera seems to work fine but the facial tracking had to be turned off to stop it from appearing that an earthquake was constantly in progress and the lighting in our bedroom is distinctly yellowish so the color looks a bit off.

I was happy to see that the camera came with software and manual in a variety of languages so I didn't have to hesitate to buy it in Japan. While you can usually download the software in English if the same product is released in both Japan and an English-speaking country, this is not always the case.

Generally, I'm not a fan of the notion of web cameras for several reasons. In this case though, it was purchased to allow my husband's parents and his mother in particular to see him when they talk. He and I don't go back to the U.S. very often (that's a dramatic understatement - I haven't been back for 16 years) and his mother is currently in poor health and the camera allows his family to see him without the plane trip back.

One of the reasons I don't like web cameras is that they symbolize the next level of privacy invasion. I think that the insistent ringing of phones and doorbells are bad enough without the idea that someone gets to see you any time they call you. With family, it's a little different because you don't have to look particularly put-together for them to see you but, with others, I dread the day when video phoning becomes the norm and everyone feels they are entitled to peer in on you if they decide to call and you decide to answer.

I also developed an early aversion to the notion of web cams because my former company dabbled with the notion of teaching lessons by telephone simultaneously with web camera transmission. This was back when ISDN was the fastest connection available. The cameras we used showed a sequence of poor quality, jerky images at a size which made any notion of "eye contact" or demonstrating pronunciation ridiculous.

What was worse about this idea was the fact that the company wanted the teachers to be on camera but the students didn't have to put their mugs on the screen. In other words, this wasn't about the illusion of face-to-face teaching at a distance, it was about letting the students watch the gaijin monkey perform. In the end, the company gave up on the idea before it ever got started because of the logistical issues. Most students didn't want to be tethered to a computer during a lesson that was done easily just with a phone. Also, the fact of the matter was that the work we did required a great deal of database entry during a conversations. We would not really be emulating eye contact because we had to spend so much time looking at the screen or keyboard to do the work.

I guess that my take on this really shows my age since YouTube is full of people who can't wait to upload videos of themselves talking about their lives or doing dumb things. While I think that video or pictures should be mainly for an audience of people who know you and have an emotional attachment to seeing you, it seems that others feel its just as good to put themselves out there for the amusement of strangers. Perhaps living in Japan where I often feel my mere presence often amuses strangers has seriously put me off of any such notion.

The Wages Grudge Match

Many foreigners working as teachers in Japan may find themselves encountering animosity or jealousy from Japanese coworkers over what they feel are unfair working conditions. That is, they feel foreign employees are underworked and overpaid relative to Japanese employees. This attitude results from a variety of factors which mislead both the Japanese staff and the foreign teachers into thinking the situation for teachers is much rosier than it actually is.

In order to truly understand the situation, you have to consider the differences in the Japanese job market as well as the salary structure in Japan compared to western countries. Like many things in Japan, the payment situation is complex and varies on a case-by-case basis. However, you can break things down into general categories with what I'm sure are may exceptions on an individual basis.

Here are three very general categories of employment for Japanese people:

Category 1: Hourly wage-based work

This is work which is generally done by people who have not completed higher education (that is, they have only completed high school). This type of work is the sort of thing many people do in transition with the exception of skilled labor (like construction work). This type of work may pay as low as minimum wage and generally does not represent any opportunity for advancement. In Tokyo, the minimum wage tends to be about 900 yen an hour. Since this is essentially "unskilled" work and foreigners who work as teachers in Japan must have a university degree to qualify for visa sponsorship, this type of wage and work cannot be compared to that which teachers do.

Mimimum wage work generally requires no education beyond high school. Just as you expect people in MacDonald's in the U.S. to make less than a high school teacher, you can expect the same of Japanese minimum wage workers and foreign teachers in Japan.

Category 2: Contract work

These types of workers span a wide variety of jobs requiring many different skills. The commonality is that these employees work a set number of hours for a set wage which is usually between 150,000-220,000 yen a month for a 40-hour week. The big difference between these workers and the final category of workers is that they do not work unpaid overtime. If they work overtime, they are paid for the extra hours.

This type of employee tends to be female and have a junior college level education or a liberal arts degree from a school which isn't from the top 5-10 universities. Such people are often married and working mainly to augment lifestyle or income but also sometimes they are young women (or, more rarely, men) in transition who hope to secure a better situation after gaining skills or experience.

These types of Japanese employees are roughly analogous to foreign workers in terms of how their wages and working conditions are handled though not the same in terms of workload, expectations or required skill level. However, these employees are the type that frequently experience seasonal "down time" and are working very hard at times and killing time at others. Foreign employees usually work the same year round at the nearly full capacity of their schedules.

This is the type of office lady/secretary that foreign workers often work with in schools. They do the scheduling, answer the phones and handle students. This type of worker is the type of person you are most likely to have problems with or experience resentment from as they are generally not valued by the company and often succumb to pressure to work unpaid overtime despite the fact that it is against the law for companies to compel them to do so.

Category 3: Company workers

This is the type of worker that is the stuff of stereotypes. They work long hours and often feel a lot of pressure to do well for their companies. It's also where the greatest confusion comes in as these types of workers undergo a transformation in working conditions and salary as they continue to work at Japanese companies.

Typically, a university graduate is employed by a company with few or no skills relevant to his or her future job. In fact, most of them do not know precisely what job they will do when recruited at the beginning of their senior year. During their initial years, they work hard, learn the ropes, and are relatively low paid. As they stay longer at the company, they get paid more as they are seen as more productive. In some companies, salary increases when one marries or has children. When such employees reach their 30's, they start to make a pretty good wage in the vicinity of what English teachers make. As they reach their 40's, they will make 300,000-450,000 yen a month in most cases. By their 50's most are making over 400,000 a month depending on the company. Senior manager types may make as much as (or more than) 500,000 yen a month by the time of retirement. You can generally guess a salaried employee's monthly take by their title. A bucho tends to be in the 400,000-500,000 yen range.

In general, salaried employees get a raw deal initially and later do far better (though that has been changing recently, it hasn't changed as much as everyone believes).

Why Foreigners Should Be Paid More:

Among salaried workers, there are a wide variety of benefits that you don't get as a contract employee. Most foreigners working in Japan (particularly teachers) are contract workers. Among the perks foreigners do not get are:

• Free company housing/large housing supplements. I'm not talking about cheaper rent and a lower wage like the language schools give. I'm talking about people who get a place free or for 10,000-30,000 yen a month. Some companies provide complete housing free of charge and others may offer up to 100,000 yen a month as a housing bonus.
• Paid national holidays. The Japanese have 12 national holidays and most of the weekend days have been moved over to Mondays. That is a minimum of 10 days a year the Japanese get which foreign staff usually do not. In the golden age, teachers used to get paid national holidays. It's rarer and rarer for that to be the case.
• National health insurance supplemental pay. If you're paying your own health insurance, you may be forking over 20,000-30,000 yen a month from a usual teacher's salary. Japanese staff often get 50% of that covered by the company.
• The biggest difference of all is that foreigners are rarely involved in the twice yearly bonus system. Contract employees are paid more on a monthly basis but do not get the "balloon" payment in summer and winter that company workers do. Most companies give salaried workers between one and three months (typically, two months) pay twice a year. The Japanese who resent foreign salaries conveniently disregard factoring in the 4 extra months of wages they get which we do not.

There are also a variety of circumstantial differences which factor into the pay difference.

• Foreign workers are rare. They may not be as rare as they used to be but the law of supply and demand requires we be paid more to make it worthwhile being here.
• Foreign workers work harder even if Japanese workers work longer. I know a lot of people will quibble with this but teaching in Japan is harder than nearly any other country because the students are so passive. You have to pour a lot of energy into your work and often get little or nothing back. It's stressful and exhausting. If you don't pay a better wage, no one will do it.
• Foreign employees work without a security net. If you like, you can consider extra compensation a way of adjusting for the fact that we have no family, friends, or support network in many cases to fall back on in cases of financial hardship.
  
• Most foreign workers who become teachers come over with debt from university. You can't afford to work for 200,000 yen a month if you've got bills to pay. Most Japanese students walk away from university debt-free. If you require employees with a university diploma, the wage you offer has to be enough to make the job worthwhile for them considering their typical circumstances. New employees who make less than the average teacher live in company dorms or at home with their parents and have no college debt. We don't have that luxury.
• If you work here, you don't pay in to any sort of retirment fund (like social security) as a teacher. You also have no unemployment insurance or possibility of severance if you are fired. You have to make enough to sock it away for yourself.
  

I've found that the main friction regarding teachers and staff who feel they are overpaid comes from "category 2" workers who are paid little and have little opportunity for advancement. A disproportionate number of those workers are female, unappreciated, and unrewarded in any way for their talents or extra effort. They carry a whole host of issues outside of feeling that teachers make more without working long hours. You find if you work in an office with salaried male employees that they are making as much or more than you and tend not to think you're spoiled and overpaid.

The bottom line though is always going to be supply and demand. If we get paid more for working fewer hours, it's because that's what the market will bear.

Finding a Job Teaching in Japan

Back when I was suffering some serious physical problems, even more serious depression, and general burn-out from having worked for so long, my husband did a serious job search so he could work full-time and I could quit and rest. During his search, he was rather surprised at some of the ways in which the job market had changed since he'd last done such a search. Bear in mind that everything I say about work, pay and hours relates to working as a teacher in Tokyo. Wages in other areas are sometimes lower because of the lower cost of living.

One of the points which he realized was that the 250,000 yen for 25 hours standard which was the case about 15-20 years ago had changed to 250,000 yen for 30 hours and often that is 30 "contact" teaching hours and will not include prep time. That means that you may be required to be on the premises for more than 30 hours even though your contract stipulates you work for 30 hours. Generally speaking, teachers make from 1800-2500 yen an hour at conversation schools or in structured teaching environments.

My husband also discovered that most teaching jobs included a small or large number of hours devoted to teaching children. In fact, low pay for teaching kids is pretty much the most frequently listed work in "The Japan Times" and other classified ads in printed publications. If you're in a hurry for a job and female, this is the quickest route to employment though not necessarily the best type of work. Teaching kids can involve accommodating doting or hawk-eyed parents who will eat up your time with meetings or attempt to coerce you into teaching in a different fashion. Additionally, as if often the case in any educational situation, handling kids can be harder than dealing with adults.

The big chain schools (Nova, GEOS, and AEON) seem to be doing far more of their recruiting abroad and less hiring from inside of Japan. Competition has also caused them to increase total working hours without increasing wages, decrease class time from a standard 50-60 minute lesson to 40 minutes, and decrease overall benefits such as paid national holidays.

Most of the chain schools when hiring from abroad also provide housing at a slightly reduced rate for the teachers they hire. The housing supplement can be considered as an additional 10,000-30,000 yen per month in salary depending on the situation. The main thing is that the schools get a deal on the apartments that you wouldn't get. That is, you may not be able to find a place for 50,000-60,000 yen a month on your own so you're paying less rent through your school than you would if you found your own place. However, the school probably owns the building or has a lease which allows them to have the place at a lower rate so they aren't actually augmenting your income and it's possible that they make money on the deal. That doesn't mean you don't benefit from the arrangement though.

In general, working for one of these schools means working harder and dealing sometimes with rigid conditions (such as Nova's system of penalties) on the down-side but also having someone else set you up with a place to live and help you with any of the logistical issues of moving to Japan on the up-side. The wages are more than enough to live on if you don't go crazy clubbing, boozing, or eating out at expensive places. People who don't have connections in Japan or who feel uncomfortable with the uncertainties of travel abroad often find such places a good way of getting a foothold or simply finding a way to spend a year in Japan before going home and doing something else.

One problem with these chain schools for some people is that they tend to be somewhat rigid in their teaching structure. Some of them will monitor lessons and reprimand teachers for not following the method the school follows. If you're new to teaching and uncertain of what to do, these types of places can be helpful in your initial months as you can follow their patterns when you teach. If you're experienced, such places can be tedious and stifling as you can't be creative and even good teachers may find themselves being admonished rather than rewarded for their attempts to be innovative or creative.

Other job possibilities include working in junior high schools or high schools as an assistant teacher. This can be done through the JET program but also via other means. I don't actually have any experience with these types of jobs because neither my husband nor I are willing to teach kids. I've heard a lot of varied reports about such jobs but one common theme is that the teachers are often given little to do or not taken seriously compared to the Japanese teachers at the schools. However, the working conditions (pay for the number of hours, paid vacation time) can be relatively favorable.

There are also random full-time jobs at various schools you can find largely from on-line job searching. These places don't tend to advertise as much in print because of the cost. The main considerations with these sorts of places is that they sometimes operate on a limited budget and may overwork what few teachers they have and sometimes have been known to have teachers sign ambiguous contracts so that they can compel them to do more than should be reasonably expected. Such places have to be considered on a case by case basis. Some are great and some are pretty awful.

There are also a few places that hire teachers to teach in-company lessons on a case-by-case basis. Some of these agencies offer enough work to make a full wage. Others are mainly good as a means to augment your income with spare cash. The good point of these types of jobs is that they tend to pay much better hourly wages (3500-5000 yen an hour in most cases). The bad point is that most places want the same evening hours so it's hard to schedule in enough of these types of jobs to make a full wage and they often require copious amounts of travel, sometimes very far from where you live. If the locations of the companies are sufficiently far distant, the amount of money you make spread across the total time you spend getting there, teaching, and getting back won't seem quite so impressive. Generally speaking, such jobs require core evening hours - from 6:00 pm to 9:00 pm - for the most lucrative pay. You can sometimes get early morning work but the wages tend to be far lower, sometimes no better than working at a conversation school.

The main problem with relying on agencies that contract with teachers for the higher-paying in-company lessons is that there are no guarantees whatsoever, no paid vacation of any kind, and a lot of uncertainty about the numbers of hours you'll get. My former company is one of the few places that contracted for this sort of work in a fashion which would guarantee a certain amount of money each month but even they don't make any long-term promises and your entire day can be eaten up by a fairly gap-filled schedule and travel time.

The bottom line is that you have to make 250,000 yen a month in order to qualify for work visa sponsorship. There are loopholes that allow companies to undercut that in reality. They can sign you up for a contract that says they'll pay you 250,000 yen a month for 30 hours but have you work less than 30 hours a week. Immigration will not check on whether or not you actually make what your contract stipulates and (almost) no one will act as your advocate if you aren't making as much as you believed you might. You have to be very careful to make sure you understand what you're getting into and ask questions to clarify your situation. Also, companies are legally obliged to give full-time employees ten days off the first year and one additional day for each year you renew. If they give you fewer days, they are violating Japanese labor laws.

My husband ended up taking a situation which offered a decent base hourly wage up until 30 hours and a higher wage after 30 hours have been worked. It doesn't offer any guarantees about the number of hours you get per week though. He hasn't had any trouble at all getting enough hours (fairly popular teachers don't) and the working conditions are very flexible. He can pretty much teach what he wants and set his own hours. No one hassles him if he requests time off and he's not pressured to do any extra work of any kind.

The price of this flexibility and lack of hassle is that he gets no paid national holidays, no raises on an annual basis, and sometimes has to kill time between lessons if his schedule doesn't fill up. If the school were to suffer a drop in business, he would also be stuck for getting in enough hours but that seems like a pretty unlikely possibility given the school's well-trafficked location.

In general, you can choose between better hourly wages or a more secure situation which offers lower wages. For newcomers, the secure situation is often a good way to start. Once you know the ropes, the higher wage situations are easier to seek out and find a way to rely on.