I endorse the spirit of DQEE. It is because the English
language business in Japan has greater discrimination than the former South
African apartheid.
First of all, most English language schools and English
language teaching companies in Japan will not hire Asian-looking or Black or
Southeast Asian or Afro-American instructors, although they may be native English
speakers. However, they hire many blonde and blue-eyed Eastern European
instructors who have thick accents and hardly speak English.
On the other hand,
normal Japanese companies do not hire any foreigners as managers or even
employees, and they only hire Japanese nationals. There is also active
discrimination against male instructors.
I have often encountered cases where
the Japanese company clients would request a young, female, blonde instructor,
or during the course request a change to a young, female, Caucasian instructor.
When this keep reoccurring, one wonders about the criteria of the Japanese
companies that hold English lessons for their employees either compulsory or
volunteer, and the reasons of the employees for taking English lessons.
Other
issues I have faced is the continued lay offs of English teachers by these
schools and training companies, in order to keep their labor costs low. Many of
these firms and organizations continue to terminate the one-year contracts with
instructors after a few years, so that they do not have to raise salaries and
wages, even though the salary and wages of English instructors is already low
compared to all the salaries, benefits, multiple allowances, and status
privileges that normal Japanese public and private school Japanese instructors
get.
Many times, it is the English language school head instructors who
systematically make false excuses or falsify evaluations, in order to get rid
of high performance capable instructors who threaten their jobs.
In the
Japanese public schools and private schools, they hire foreign English teachers
as English Language Assistants (ELAs) to teach the students.
The Japanese
English language instructors often are masters of English grammar, but they
cannot speak English conversationally, and their accent is all wrong and
incomprehensible. For example, instead of saying, “This is a pen,” they say, “Jisu
izu ah pin.” They make the ELAs create all the English language training
materials, which they do much better, because of the creativity of foreign
teachers.
The Japanese public school teachers do not have that much creativity,
because they are brought up and educated in a rigid, militaristic, central
government controlled Ministry of Education national textbook educational environment.
The entire culture punished creativity; hence the famous Japanese saying, “The
nail that sticks out gets hammered down,” and it becomes a mind made from
manuals and methods and repetition of traditional ways of doing things.
However, Japanese school teachers are treated as full-time lifetime employees
with huge salaries and many allowances, while the foreign ELAs are only hired
on a one-year contract with very low pay.
This is the reason why all the
established evaluation agencies of the world have rated Japan with very low “human
rights” ratings globally due to all the open discrimination and prejudice and
inhumane treatments of workers and violation of human rights.
There is an
overflow of English language teachers in Japan, because they hire all the college
students who just want to come to Japan to play around and have fun, then go
back to their countries after a year.
Age is another area where “human rights”
are violated. Normal Japanese companies will have on their recruitment ads and
job descriptions an age limit of 30 or 35 years old. One has to work up the
ranks, and after 30 years they can finally become managers.
Even if you are a
genius and a company executive in a foreign firm in Japan, if you apply to a
Japanese company, they will start you off with a very low salary as a low-level
employee. Many people who are laid off in their 40s and 50s have no companies
that will accept them, even if they were senior managers and capable people in
their former companies, so I have seen many of them working as taxi drivers or
convenience store clerks. This is the reality of Japan and its labor market.
This is why I respect cultures like the United States that hire people from any
nation or ethnicity or age or gender (although there is a lot of discrimination
against Christians now) for their management positions, and it is a nation that
is based on performance and hard work and knowledge, instead of ethnicity or
connections or lineage or age or race. This is what made the U.S. a superpower.
Currently, Japan only hires Indian software programmers into their Japanese
companies, but this has to change to accept people of all ethnicity, age,
gender, religion, physical appearance, and race. This is why I respect what
Nicky is doing by being a pioneer and leading the battlefront and undaunted
advocate for the “human rights” of workers (especially foreigners) in Japan,
and I thoroughly endorse his endeavors. It is a difficult upward battle, and
may take centuries to change this medieval feudal system in Japan, but one has
to start somewhere.
Anonymous English & Business Instructor in Japan for 25
years
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