Pros
The children were absolutely amazing and the campus in Kiba was beautiful. The other teachers were friendly and equally as passionate about teaching.
Cons
Where to begin? Allow me to break it down in brief sections I'd like to call: Camp, Lice, Turnover, Assistants, and Tax. Camp: You are expected to go on numerous camp outings throughout the year. These are overnight trips where you are working basically nonstop for four days during the Summer and two weekends in the Fall and Winter. During the weeks you have weekend camps you will likely work for two weeks plus Saturday straight with no days off. Speaking of time off. You don't get any. Everyone's days off (including sick days!) are scheduled during a predetermined week in the year. Therefore requiring any time off for any reason results in a deduction of pay. Lice: During the large majority of my time at this company lice was all but rampant throughout the campuses. It started, conceivably, with one or two students. Once detected, these students were not asked to stay home. Their teacher got lice. It spread between grade levels and other teachers. Then it was transferred to another campus because one of the traveling teachers got it. Kids with lice were allowed to go to camp where they slept side by side with a half dozen other kids. All of the foreign teachers complained yet the owner and admin shrugged their shoulders like it wasn't a problem. Turnover: This company has a really high turnover rate. Admin, assistants, teachers, everyone. This factor comes down to one person. The owner. The owner is a very temperamental individual. She will let people go on the spot for very minor infractions (oftentimes when she doesn't really mean to so the admin has to beg that person to come back). Some of them were let go for very silly reasons like "Needing to miss camp because they were getting married." or "Needing to return home suddenly to take care of a dying family member." THEN she will come in and lie to the rest of the teachers about what happened. As if we aren't friends with the admin and other teachers and they don't just sent us screen shots of the owner's volatile text messages. Assistants: This is the biggest one on the list. Something I didn't originally notice when I started working there was that all of the assistants were Filipino. That in and of itself it not the problem. The problem came when the company was inspected by Filipino Immigration. The owner has been hiring people from overseas on tourist visas, bringing them to work at the school and changing their visas to work visas. Then, she proceeds to pay them excruciatingly little. And in spite of being "teachers" on their visas, she would often schedule them to clean her home. When Immigration came to investigate she ordered the teachers to lie to a government agency about the legal status of the assistants. It was after this meeting I began recording all of our conversations. With proof and dozen of both teacher and assistant emails sent to Immigration we hoped something would be done. Taxes: After leaving the company I attempted to figure out all of my taxes for this year at my local city hall office. My recorded number for residency tax was mysteriously 0 yen. Good thing I had all of my pay slips stating I had paid or I'd probably had to have pay residency taxes a second time.
