Let's Japan.org Debunking Eikaiwa and Ramblings in Japan

The Asahi Shimbun reported on a look at what you have probably already seen: Sahashi's lavish office. As the walls slowly close in on him, the media has started to dogpile on him for the fat, juicy target he is. Nothing sells newspapers like a corrupt head of a company falling hard.

Note: The office appears in the final 46 seconds of the video.

According to the Asahi, the office is roughly 3,300 square feet in size (330 square meters), cost at least 60 million yen and comes furnished with leather sofas, a mini bar, chandelier lighting, a tearoom, bedroom, sauna, and a bathroom. This isn't an office, it's a lavish playhouse.

He certainly lived high on on the hog and it would seem that he got all of these trappings on the back of deception and cheap labor according to the second part of The Daily Yomiuri's three part series:

During fiscal 2005, a year in which the company sharply increased new schools, it racked up 11 billion yen in publicity expenses--about one-sixth of its turnover in that period.

One trick Nova used to inflate its earnings was to treat a portion of students' prepaid lesson fees as "enrollment fees."

"I paid 320,000 yen in fees for additional lessons, but my contract said that 30,000 yen was for enrollment fees and 290,000 yen for lessons," a student who renewed a contract in March 2005 said. "Every time I asked about this, I wasn't given a satisfactory explanation."

Accounting rules say enrollment fees can be posted as sale proceeds that can be used as operating capital. Thus, 30,000 yen was marked off as operating capital.

The low lesson prices also made Nova stand out from its competitors. The cost per lesson at other leading chains ranges from 2,300 yen to 5,000 yen, compared with about 1,800 yen a lesson for students who signed up for the longest contracts with Nova.

Rival chains wondered how Nova could keep prices so low and still stay in business. What made this possible was Nova's doing everything in its power to cut labor costs.

About 80 percent of the nearly 1,000 new Japanese employees taken on each year were female. Despite having to meet each school's strict contract quota and often having to work until late at night, the monthly take-home pay for a person in their fifth year at the company would be only about 180,000 yen.

"It's our basic policy to have people quit while their wages are low," a former executive and close associate of Sahashi said. "It's better to have young women soliciting prospective students."

With the average length of time an employee spends at the company being three years and seven months, Nova would have a fresh intake of new employees four times a year.

The man's arrogance knows no bounds. It's turning out that he scammed and ripped off everyone from Nova's investors right down to the staff and teachers.