I think leaving in the night is a misplaced, dick move that says ‘fuck you’ to some random (usually lovely) Japanese teachers rather than eikaiwas themselves (which probably don’t give a shit). However it’s a common occurrence so I thought I’d get a discussion going. Any good stories?
Two from me…
– Firstly there was some whacked out South African dude (wild tats & piercings all over) on a working holiday visa. He came one day, messaged EVERY girl in town (small town) via Facebook with his desire to fuck them (this included my wife, with him being stupid enough to show me her FB profile while saying ‘she says she’s married with a kid but I don’t believe her… I bet you 10,000 yen I get to fuck her’). Despite my better judgment, I offered to support the guy when he started crying about how hard his life was. I lent him my bike, some decent cold weather gear and some electronics (a heater and stuff). Then one day he just disappeared! A friend of mine (a lovely JT) had to clean-up his mess by taking on more (unpaid) work and when I finally got through to him he was like ‘oh yeah about your stuff… I threw it all out as I was leaving Japan and had no luggage space for it’. Thanks maaate!
– An old dude from Texas (before my time at an eikaiwa) was the stuff of legends for some reason. As the story goes, he brought his Chinese wife over and they lived in the gaijin flat above my school. She was messy as fuck (covered the kitchen in oil + threw oversized lint/hair balls from her washing onto the floor, with no concept of cleaning them up). There was literally an overgrown mushroom coming out of the bathroom door as they were so messy. Apparently his teaching was about as good as their collective cleaning efforts. He refused to sing songs (kids eikaiwa here), ‘corrected’ all the bog standard classroom English (causing mass confusion as his English was pretty shit – not all native speakers are equal). Oh and he also insisted on ~10 minutes of ‘prayer’ time in every class [shudder]. Before leaving he started giving all the mothers (plus female, middle-school / high-school kids) his e-mail address so that they could ‘have private English lessons’ with him (from all reports he then propositioned them for sex… fucking paedo!) He left in the night and I had to clean the gaijin flat (plus communal kitchen, shared with the school) out with bleach multiple times before his stench was outta it. He’d only been there for about 2 months as well so I have NFI how he made it so filthy. On the plus side, this guy’s escape gave me an awesome challenge of rebuilding the school up from ~20 loyal students who had stayed around. The upshot of all this was that it wasn’t difficult for me to improve upon his standards, and I was able to build us back up to ~150 students over the next few years without dramas.
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My “favorites” are the people who have mental health issues to begin with but think Japan will fix all their problems. It’d be more funny if not so many Japanese people were so keen to think “one foreigner = all foreigners”.
So let me get this straight…
A guy literally showed you a picture of your wife and kid and said he’s gonna fuck her…….and then you helped him out and gave him your bike?
And then a guy so dirty had fucking fungi growing out of his apartment, and the school forced you to clean it up and you did?
And then you brag about building up their dead school?
I get some people are just naturally passive but you really gotta work on being more assertive. God damn…
I know a handful of female ALTs who just up and left without a word after getting knocked up by their tinder hookups.
Lots of stories in South Korea when you google it.
I did one myself but it was due to a political and civil situation in Central Asia. Didn’t feel safe there.
What kind of cretin is interviewing these people?
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Think the worse I saw first hands were
1) A hippy woman who was much older than me eating snacks while teaching groups of elementary students. Suddenly left, didn’t give proper notice and the boss was liable for the unpaid rent after we all helped her move in.
2) a guy who signed on as an ALT, was introduced to the whole school and left the same afternoon.
I also heard stories of a drunk teaching elementary school students while stinking of booze who lived under a staircase. Wasn’t fired for a long time.
I’ve heard a few stories of people who left very early, like their first day or their first week, probably because they realized the job wasn’t what they thought it was (not that the job was bad, but just different than they had thought), or living in Japan was different than they thought, or whatever. Some people who thought they’d come to an anime paradise where they could just do whatever but then realized they’d actually have to do work 40 ish hours a week.
I’ve only heard of one person who did it as kind of a fuck you to his manager, and given that the manager was the one who had to deal with the fall out, I guess he got his wish? She wasn’t a super great manager but I just don’t know if she deserved all the hassle the dude caused.
I’ve also heard of people purposefully staying and working out their contract (with minimal effort) as a fuck you as well, since it’s pretty hard to get actually fired for just being low effort and kind of slovenly.
The best teachers acknowledge they aren’t being paid or treated correctly and bounce. I respect them. Don’t be a slave to these companies that see you as replaceable.
I was called in to help a school who’s teacher just left. This was a few years back. After winter break he came in one day, then the next day he just never appeared. After 4 days I was called in then it became permanent after he finally got in touch with the dispatch company a week or so after I arrived. It had to be the easiest 3 months of teaching as the fact I was there made the school think I was amazing.
I know a lot of people who left their Job the minute Covid travel restrictions lifted. They hated mask mask mannerism and decided this wasn’t the life. Which is fine but breaking contract over mask seems annoying since they’ve har 2-3 years now to make their mind up about mask life and work.
I worked at some scum pit eikaiwa about 5-6 years ago. I had just started but had a weird feeling about the place just after a week or 2. I was employed as the school manager/teacher. The owner was supposed to fill me in with stuff then leave me to it.
After about a month of me arriving one of the teachers suddenly left with a couple months on her contract. She was training one of the new teachers at the time. From here it just gets worse. The owner, extremely nice at first turned out to be a total $ucking a$$hole. So, I also started to look for another job. Anyway, we got a another new teacher, who after a week just disappeared. So, we got another teacher, who after a couple of months also did a runner. I left as well, I didn`t go back after the Golden Week holidays. In all my years (over 10), here in Japan this was the absolute worst time of my life. The owner was a piece of $$$$ who was banging a few of the kids` mothers, actually boasting to me about it. He fitted cameras in all the classrooms, spying in on our lessons, interrupting the classes to berate the teachers. He had been in trouble for not paying taxes, covering up the forced closure of the school as a refurbish. He regularly made the kids cry in class. Later I heard the previous manager also left with stress related problems…. Ah, there is much more but I`ll leave it there.
Are you the eikaiwa owner? If not, why are you cleaning the flat? If you are the owner, well you hired these people and should have vetted them more properly and/or gotten rid of them when they started up with the creepy sex stuff. (If this was actually a case of a guy propositioning middle schoolers for sex, I hope the police were involved).
If you’re not the owner, then you work for a horrible company, if they’re making you clean out a fungi infested flat when you’re just an English teacher.
:/
All I can say is, if schools pay shite, treat teachers like shite, don’t ask for quals, and hire anyone with a pulse…….then they aren’t exactly going to attract classy, cultured people, are they. If you have low standards then your employees are going to live up to those low standards.
Oh, in one place I worked they hired a uni teacher without bothering with a background check on his quals. Within a week he got fired. He invited a student over for “tea” and showed her a trussed-up naked girl in the corner of his room, who was apparently his BDSM slave (I’m kink friendly and all, but goddammn…). Then they learned he came to Japan to escape a warrant on assault charges, because he beat someone up and put them in the hospital.
The uni had to cancel his classes because they had to get rid of him overnight, and there was no one to take over. It got them in a world of shit.
Did I feel sorry for anyone in this scenario? Other than the poor girl who was forced to witness this guy’s kinks, nope.
I’ve heard of some stories when I used to live in Saitama, currently in Tokyo.
There is an alt contract with like 5 schools that were pretty far from each other where the alt has to drive to and the company at the time didn’t give the alt any sort of directions.
For years people would sign the contract, probably thinking it was not so bad, but end up just not going to the schools and leaving Japan after a few months.
To be fair, I’ve had 4 schools before and it was hell but they’re all close to each other and I had a bike.
I also had a friend who got hit with a car and didn’t notify anyone for a week, because the guy didn’t have a phone… He ended up hurting his leg and going on medical leave for a very long time, pissing off his employer. He went back to the states.
I have something similar, but not a complete runner.
So I decided to do a year as an ALT to get a break from young learners (they’re great but tiring after a while) and I was sent to a highschool with another ALT as a pair. Everything seemed fine at first and we only met a couple of times because corona had just started and the school was closed for the first few months. She was smiley and bright and seemed happy. Cool.
The manager and I spoke often and I asked about her so I can make sure our work is as smooth as possible. Apparently she didn’t want to say where she’s from and just mentioned that she was raised in the US. Slightly weird. Then I got an odd email from her saying she has ‘HSP’ or something; I have no idea what this is and so I google it. The definition has red flags starting to rise.
After a week or two of starting she’s completely point blank ignoring me even though we’re neighbors in the teachers room. And she’s starting to be very rude to the japanese teachers. Refusing to talk to them and insisting they leave a note on her desk…
Then one day she has her head down on the desk and her chair out behind her but one of the japanese teachers needed to get past her and politely asked to get by. She snapped at him (a very sweet older gentleman) and I lost my shit and shouted at her in japanese in front of everyone. Oops.
From that day on… And I shit you not, I’m sure she was doing her work in the cloakroom every day. The female japanese teacher sitting opposite me said she ‘can’t use the cloakroom this year’. Lol.
(If you happen to be reading this, I still think you’re a disagreeable asshole.)
The “English teaching” industry in japan is a joke to begin with so it stands to reason that foreigners treat it like one. Whatever a foreigner has done to a bottom feeding eikaiwa school or a scumbag ALT dispatch company is nothing compared to what the managers and owners of those cesspits have done to foreigners.
Many years ago a surfer bro came to my old company and got all set up with his visa and Alien Registration Card and such. He had an enormous surfboard which he somehow made the elderly company owner stuff and stow behind the school building (when surfer bro wasn’t present). I saw it sitting there. It was huge and ridiculous.
Well, before this fella’s training week started, suddenly his surfboard was gone, all his stuff was out of the school apartment, and the teacher had bounced. Someone found out (I don’t remember how), that he had come to Japan for a year of fun and used my company to do it. The workload for everyone increased to cover the position until someone else could be hired. 🙁
I remember thinking, “can the visa be cancelled so that this guy becomes an unknowing vigilante? Punish this fool.” But I don’t know what my company did or what happened to the guy.
My friend signed a contract with Heart in Inaka. She was promised only one school.
Right before she started teaching, she was told she would need to go to **four** schools. They were all very spread out.
She tried it for two weeks and then vanished without warning as it was ridiculous to make her go to all these schools.
Usually, I feel you should give some sort of notice/warning. But in this case, it was justified to ghost them
I’ve got a story to share.
Worked at a private eikaiwa in Japan. But I quit after a
year and a half because I hated my boss and covid was approaching anyway.
After I left the school, they had trouble finding a replacement English teacher. They went through at least 6 teachers after I had left (that
I was aware of) so they were clearly having trouble finding anyone good.
Anyway, they found two new teachers from the UK (a couple in
a relationship I believe) and I saw the pair on the company’s Facebook page by
chance and they looked normal enough. Shortly after they started, the company got some new promotional material made with the new teachers on it and they only update the
promotional material every couple of years (myself and the previous teacher who
were at that school for over a year were never included in the promotional
material since it wasn’t updated during that time. Getting that done wasn’t
cheap, so they must’ve liked the new teachers a lot (in addition to just
needing to update the materials)
Anyway, I found out shortly afterwards from my old
co-worker, that those two teachers a few months after starting, took the
company car for a road trip and never returned. The last time the car was reportedly
seen after that it was in a different Prefecture over 540km away from the
school. Never heard anything from then on, whether they were ever
caught or not, but I kind of enjoyed that my old boss was put through the
wringer at least a little!
New a guy who came over with a big chain.
Went through the training Ok. Was calling home every day though.
Literally day 2 after training, he called the school from the airport saying that he couldn’t handle the culture shock and lack of cheese (literally what he said) and was about to board his plane home.
Happened to me as well… I mean a teacher bouncing so I had to cover his ass. Sucks but at the same time. Don’t blame him.
The African dude sounds like a fucking legend tho… in a bad way, lol. What a hero
Worked with an American who came in one day and said he needed time off because his Dad died so he was going home. I only had worked with him for maybe a month but most of the others had worked with him for sometime so they helped him out, gave him some money towards the ticket etc.
Fast forward to about 3 months later and one of those teachers sees him walking around when he was supposed to be back in America. Turned out everything was a lie and he got a new job. lied to people that he had worked with for years and took their money.
No English teachers actually! I work with an international staff and have had Japanese teachers disappear without notice due to severe overwork.
I remember being under ratio for an entire year before learning that there was a Japanese teacher hired to help out, who had secretly bailed every day and no one noticed. A ghost employee who, once discovered, truly ghosted.
So I did this in South Korea 20 years ago, not proud of it but to give you an example of this school they stole my passport on one occasion, put me in a small three bedroom apartment after initially telling me I’d have my own place (one of my roomates was to this day the worst I’ve ever had) and I was teaching 6 hours a day 6 days a week. I went and reported the passport theft to the RCMP in Seoul (I’m Canadian and the RCMP did have an office in Seoul for some reason) and it magically re-appeared in the exact same spot it had always been in prior to that a week a later. I could’ve taken the high road but I have no doubt they would’ve made my life very difficult if I had given them the proper 2 week notice.
On behalf of all South Africans looking to do alt work in Japan, I am sorry. 😭
>An old dude from Texas (before my time at an eikaiwa) was the stuff of legends for some reason.
>I had to clean the gaijin flat (plus communal kitchen, shared with the school) out with bleach multiple times before his stench was outta it.
This doesn’t make sense…
How did you build the school back up from 20 to 150 students?
It is not unusual for a JETs or two to literally deplane at Narita, lock themselves in a bathroom stall before customs and call their parents to return home.
Only one, had to do with their housing condition. In all fairness, their predecessor left their apartment in terrible shape, much worse than anyone of us imagined. Multiple ALTs in town offered to host them for a few nights (the person declined), and we started to make plans to go as a group to clean up the place, but the next day we got a call from the BoE that they were already at the airport.
* Big, soft-spoken African-American guy. Great educational and professional background and interviewed well. He came for his first day, the main manager dropped him off at the apartment for the weekend. “See you again on Monday.” That kind of thing. Monday rolls around, he isn’t there. Get in touch after a few hours. “Sorry, I have to go back to Tokyo. You can keep the stuff in the apartment.” Manager gets access to the rented apartment to clean it up. The furniture is smashed, there are bloody tissues around, women’s clothing and make-up strewn on the floor. It’s like he went out, got the apartment all nice, and then had an episode and wrecked everything. Apparently he invited his male lover to come and stay and they had a huge argument complete with fisticuffs. I think he was too ashamed to face us after that.
* White American guy in his late 20s. Came off a little eccentric, kind of had a “beat poet” vibe, but nothing too crazy. He really wanted to play chess with me and he was pretty good (I don’t really play chess so I’m like… 700 or something on the internet, so that’s hardly difficult). He got lost on the train after training. They got hold of him and all was fine. Apparently after that he showed up piss-drunk on his first day at an elementary school, locked himself in a supply closet and started screaming and crying about an ex-girlfriend. He went home quickly after.
* Young, handsome American guy shows up for his first day, it’s alright. The weekend rolls around and on Monday he is fired. He was attempting to hook up with a female manager. He was really trying his utmost, but she was married and not interested. He was kind of dickish about it. When he was fired, he tried to claim that he was just being friendly and the messages were not sexual because he is gay. To prove his gayness, he sent pictures of himself crossdressing. Nobody bought it, he got his marching orders.
* Young South Asian woman was there for months, things are alright. One day she doesn’t show up. Turns out she flew home the night before. To make matters worse, she sold the furniture of the apartment. She never replied to emails and never returned to Japan so the company had to eat the cost.
* Nerdy white American girl got into some sex slave relationship with a foreign guy in another prefecture and moved to be there with him. She started wearing collars and shit like that in the days before she left. Not exactly without notice but it was a strange way to end her job there.
I had to leave one in Taiwan. It was almost the exact teaching style as Heart Corporation, they had copied their methods from 1960s Japan. They didn’t train you, so you were hated by the actually-trained native teachers because none of them knew you were untrained, they cut your salary by over 50% for arbitrary reasons, gave you 2-3 performance reviews a day which all contradicted each other, cut your hours starting in week 2 despite the contract guarenteeing you hours, had you sign fake contracts and do a bunch of illegal stuff for them to escape government taxes, commute to the school was 3 hours long from their company dorms, psychotic drug-addict coworkers, teachers hitting students, finally they even tried to get me to stay in the country illegally. They started completely withholding my pay, claiming there was some kind of cash supply issue, when they suspected I wanted to leave. And that’s only half of it.
Oh god I have a wild story for you.
There was this teacher from Oklahoma. Never left the US before, let alone lived abroad. Freshly divorced. Middle aged. Never taught anything, let alone English. But of course my eikaiwa would hire this walking red flag.
He walked in the first day, bright eyed and bushy tailed, shaking everyone’s hand with a big grin on his face. But gradually, as you might guess, things began to go south.
He asked us about places to live. He wanted a 2ldk with a big closet and a big kitchen within a 15-minute commute of our central Tokyo location…for under 100,000 yen a month. I told him “well, I’m sorry. You’re not going to find a place like that” but he wasn’t going to budge.
Slowly, his demeanor changed. He stopped chatting in the teacher’s room. His smile disappeared. My coworker, who lived in the same building as him, noticed he had covered the windows in foil. And then, he called out of work saying that he was unable to make it… because he tore every single one of his dress shirts.
We never saw him again.
Moral of the story: Do not go abroad to run away from your problems. They always follow you.