I’m going back home to my country this January for a week and I’ve already bought tickets.
Is there anything my language school can do to stop me from coming back to Japan?
My sensei said I’m not allowed to do so because I’ll miss around 6 days of classes. Is this just something she said because she’s a teacher and isn’t allowed to say it’s fine to skip classes?
3 comments
in recent years, there has been rising cases of people enrolling in language schools and then working illegally
so the schools are now fined if attendance rates are low
they cannot bar you from taking a vacation, but the above could be the reason for their dissuading you to take a break
if you explain to them your reason for taking a break, I am pretty sure it can be worked out
They can’t really stop you from coming back, however due to stricter immigration rules:
* If your attendance rate drops below 80%, you wont be able to renew / get another student visa
* If your attendance rate is below 90%, other schools (including universities and vocational schools) might not accept you if you apply to them in the future
Also, if you’ve had a pattern of low attendance — often skipping classes, etc. — the school can & will expel you, to protect themselves. Then basically your visa / status of residence gets revoked and you’ll have to leave Japan within 14 days unless you qualify for another status of residence.
(In this case it would be unlikely that another school will accept you — so you can’t just transfer to another school to get another residence status).
TL;DR: especially if you plan to stay in Japan & get another visa in the future, you need to keep your attendance rate above 80% and ideally above 90%.
I would highly advise against it. It will impact your attendance heavily and could hurt your chances of getting visas in the future and if it becomes an issue you will be expelled. If you’re in language school you’ll more than likely get a break every 3 months. Use that time to go home not the middle or especially the very beginning of the term. I had a classmate miss a large chunk of the term and he failed the class, didn’t get a recommendation letter from the school, failed his JLPT, and was not accepted into 専門学校 so he had to leave Japan.