English Teachers, Are you being Spied on?

Allan JARDINE

The life I found as an English teacher in Ibaraki was shocking. The regime turned my life into sleepless nights, and was the cause of a dull pain in my stomach.

This English school institutionalized through the training of its "managers" (who should more appropriately be called "management covert operatives") a system where even daily pleasantries such as: "What did you do on the weekend?" "How are you?" "What did you have for lunch?" would be collected, and eventually reported, these seemingly innocent answers given by the teacher under the false pretense of civility would be analyzed and twisted by management in preparation for one of the regular character assassinations dealt out by this ruthless and heartless employer.

On one occasion, a comment by a teacher in response to a question “how are you" from a branch manager of "not so well, I am a little tired" (a reasonable comment after an 8 hour shift) was reported behind the teacher's back to the headquarters. As a result the female was brought in and in punishment for admitting that she was "tired" had one of her days of work cancelled each week.

This placed her in a position where she was not making enough money to survive (in other words, she was having to dip into her saving to make ends meet). The management made her work even harder to get back her sixth day. (She would have to prove she could "handle" six days a week. This resulted in her taking energy drinks to get through the day). My personal opinion was that this particular individual was a very trusting vulnerable individual and to bully her was a disgrace. Another married teacher had been asking for a five day week for a year and was constantly refused. Insane? Yes - Insane.

I myself was victimized and nearly lost my job for engaging in intelligent conversations with other teachers. The biggest fear of the school was to have teachers who (1) knew things, (2) knew their rights, (3) spoke Japanese, (4) was seeking to make friends. I was all of these, and I was brought in and accused of a series of trumped-up charges, all of which were false. All 'charges' were dropped when I agreed not to speak to the others. I agreed for the immediate term, and left as soon as I could.

There is no secret that English teacher turnover is higher than most industries, however this particular schools' turnover was so high that within two months of arriving half of the 20-odd staff had either left officially, 'disappeared' without a trace, or been fired because they stood up for themselves.

This cycle of doom and gloom would continue when the next batch of naive teachers (maybe more appropriately called victims) arrived. All mention of these phenomena was prohibited and the penalty for disobedience was being fired and having your reputation destroyed by unfounded lies dished out to ones peers.

The other group of victims are, of course, the Japanese students who enroll. It is my experience that the Japanese students were having their learning slowed down and were being strung along - why take two months to complete a text when a year will do?

Why did this school operate the way it did? A very good question. In most cases, the reason for cruel management is profit, in other words it is more profitable to treat people badly, than treat them well. However in this case I am left scratching my head. Lets face it - people teach English nowadays for the love of it, no one gets rich quick. Surely it would make more sense to treat teachers well and have them stay longer. I would love to know why English teachers are treated like this - Is it a spiral of mistrust for foreigners? I simply am left wondering ...

In my opinion most of the teachers were decent people who just wanted to teach and have a Japan experience, however they end up being pawns to the unscrupulous, the fraudulent and the greedy; many were counting the days until they could return home to a less cruel and more sane environment - is this the image that Japan wants to export? On the other hand, most of the students had a genuine interest in learning English and a system that slows their progress down to a crawl makes this a double disgrace.

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