Part One of my trip down Memory Lane will cover Nova’s working conditions in 1996. Part Two is called; ‘Nova Instructors and other animals’ and will cover the scandals and juicy stuff. Stay tuned.
I first heard about Nova when an acquaintance came back from Japan with more than a million yen in cash after 12 months. As he was a hard drinker and traveled around SE Asia – it seemed like a good deal.
I applied to Nova, not really knowing anything about Japan. I remember the interviewer asking if I was interested in going to the Kanto area. I replied, ‘What is Kanto?’ I got offered a job anyway.
The paperwork and visas were handled efficiently from what I remember. Nova had deals with airlines at that time and offered discounted airfares. They were sending large groups of ‘senseis’ a couple of times a month so were an attractive client for the airlines I guess.
Airport Pick-up: Flights with Nova people arrived from the US, US, and Australia arrived on the same day. We were greeted by Peter M and a woman with a crumpled blouse and tight mini-skirt (she looked like she had been out for a night in Roppongi). Peter M was mostly focused on seeing if anyone had any newspapers from the plane. The guy in charge of taking us to our apartments in a mini-bus was there too. This was pre-Internet so we didn’t realize that paying 6,000 yen for a 70-minute ride to our apartments wasn’t a rip-off. One guy wasn’t impressed when he was told to get his bicycle sent via a delivery company because the mini-bus was full. Nova later covered the transport expense after complaints.
Salary: The basic salary was 257,000 yen. But you got paid 5,000 yen for each late shift ( from 1:20 PM) and 10,000 for each Sunday on a monthly basis. Most people worked three late shifts and Sundays so the salary was 282,000 yen to start.
Promotions: Assistant Trainers were paid 10,000 yen more. Trainers were paid 15,000 yen more.
Pay Raises: You either got 5,000, 10,000, or 15,000 each year. I was given 10,000 or 15,000 yen for the first 5 or 6 years. After that that they started reducing raises.
Perks: I heard before I joined Nova that branches offered coffee and Japan Times newspapers in the ‘Voice Room’. Also, on Christmas Eve each school received a cake/cakes from the head office. There used to be end-of-year parties in Shinjuku for those who helped with the cleaning of branches. Gaijins were eventually banned because some of them were hitting on the female staff.
Deductions: Nova offered their JMA health insurance for 6,000 yen a month. No pensions were offered. I was lucky in that after I left Nova I was able to pay back most of the missing pension contributions when they had a 10-year back payment scheme.
Overtime: The rate was a fixed 2,300 for 40 or 45-minute lessons. The school managers could decide about OT so often they opened up overtime schedules when they weren’t really justified. Each school had bunches of faxed notices from different branches offering OT so you could choose where you wanted to work. I did OT most weeks as I had one shared day off with my gf so was free the other day. I probably worked at over 50 branches. I used to roll up and do my favorite lessons on auto-pilot.
Savings: Every month I sent fairly large amounts of money back to my home country for investments. Flights were cheaper back then and I did some travelling every year. Return flights to Europe were 70,000 yen. Flights to the US and Australia were cheaper still. So, even if I paid for a flight I could still send back 100,000 yen or whatever that month.
Staff: I was told by several different people that at the time Nova was ‘officially’ one of the best places for females to work for as they could raise through the ranks faster than at most companies in Japan. Most of the staff were pretty good. Although, the quality of the staff seemed to decline year-on-year…
16 comments
Neat I never was able to pass their interview
Cheers for this. I always enjoy a taste of the olden days
Crazy. Now Nova pays less, doesn’t reimburse any flight expenses for employees, doesn’t pick up people from the airport, doesn’t pay any extra for late or weekend work and doesn’t give any pay rises. I imagine it was even more money during the bubble?
Memory lane here. Not sure why, but I was paid more than you in 2001 in Kanto
Crazy you remember that much detail about all the the OT pay and salary. I was there from 93-94 in the Tokyo area, and I think my pay was around that, maybe a little higher coming off the bubble. Moved to another company at the end of my year contract, life got way better.
Can I ask a stupid question? Worked for Nova from 97 and recall my base salary being 275,000. (Sun 10-5 / Mon – Th 1-9)
An old timer explained to me that if Nova could pay any lower, they would, but they couldn’t.
He said that 275,000 was set by the government as a minimum for the visa sponsorship.
Is that true or am I misremembering details?
I had a spouse visa at that time, so it didn’t have any impact on me.
When I left in 2002, I recall being at around 320,000? 325,000?
Which brings me to my next question.
If that was the case, what the heck happened?
Why is it that companies can offer unliveable salaries now and still offer sponsorship?
Awesome post. I would love to hear more about your time there and what life was like.
The golden years
I was there from about 2002 to 2004 for my sins in a previous life. I occasionally bump into a guy who I worked with and is still there.
Grumbles about them whenever I see them. Said they even charge teachers what could be described “as rent” for teaching using the school’s classrooms and furnishings. I mean, you can’t make this stuff up.
Thanks for the memories! Nova 98-2000
It’s really refreshing i can hear a bubble story from a foreigner’s perspective.
I joined Nova in the mid-2000s after the shakai hoken debacle and it is interesting how similar things were years later. Back then it was more than possible to save 100,000 per month, even on the reduced contracts without doing overtime.
I worked at the MM Center and had all late shifts – I got paid more money than coworkers who had all early shifts, and they had to be at work at 7:30 AM.
I’m still friends with some of the people who I worked with there – some started working at universities, others went into IT and even one opened his own restaurant.
I could make one of these for 1989, but I think it would make people working there now feel even worse about how screwed over they are. :-p I will say the starting salary was 285,000 yen then, with a bump if you took on more early shifts and if you stayed past three months. However, there was no health insurance (or pensions) included at all. No one even told you it existed and you should get it back then.
I worked at NOVA during the late 90s. I remember all the available overtime. On Sunday evening, a LONG fax would come through, listing all the schools that would need emergency teachers to cover lessons during the upcoming week. It seemed like EVERY school in the Tokyo metropolitan area needed coverage. I wanted to pay off my student loans, so for 3 months, I worked every Monday and Tuesday, my normal days off. I used to work 12 hours on both days, at various schools. I always tried to do the OT at schools that were fairly close to my apartment, but with Tokyo’s stellar transportation system, it wasn’t too bad to work at distant schools. The overtime was ALWAYS available. I remember one time 2 teachers called off at my school. The manager called various share houses where NOVA teachers lived, begging anyone to come in to cover the classes. The person who answered the phone would literally yell into the common room “Hey, anyone want to work today?” (Remember; this was right before cell phones became really popular, before everyone had an email account).
I remember feeling happy that NOVA employed so many fuckups, flakes, alcoholics, lazy sods. Thanks to them, I was able to pay off all my student loans in one year. I hated everything about the NOVA curriculum (can it even be called a curriculum?) and I felt bad for the students who had to study from such piss-poor books.
Overtime pay was great. Still peeved I was denied a perfect dress score at evaluation.
I got them to enrol me in shakai hokken though. It was doable, they just didn’t advertise and dealing with Osaka every time something came up was never fun.
257,000 a month in 1996? Back when I was an engineer at a regional company I didn’t even make 200000 in 2020. Extra glad I quit now damn…