A former English teacher himself, Martinson draws from his own experience to create a fictional account of a young man named Dan Wells. The story is often ambient and introspective, emphasizing the day to day events of life abroad. Our hero, Dan, is a passive character rarely found in American storytelling. Martinson expertly guides Dan through the story and keeps him balanced, so we can easily look down on his passiveness in one scene and sympathize with it in the next. This expertise makes Tonoharu more than a mere parody of teaching English in Japan. It is a purposeful tale of a fully realized character teaching English in Japan, which in itself is rare.

The art, of course, is what draws most people to check out the series in the first place (myself included). Martinson’s style is reminiscent of the Belgian artist, Herge. The intricate backgrounds contrast with the simpler designs of the characters, allowing the reader to inhabit the story’s environments. Of course, there is little I can say that the art itself can’t say better.

Image from Lars Martinson / Media

Lars Martinson studied East Asian Calligraphy for two years in Fukuoka after his initial experience of English teaching. His own personal style, compounded with his knowledge of ancient inking technique, really shows and the art alone is worth a purchase of both volumes.

A paperback edition of Tonoharu Part One is due out this summer. Until then, hardcover editions of both parts are available through most book retailers and Martinson’s own website: http://larsmartinson.com/buy/

For the tech-savvy, Martinson’s more light-hearted e-comics are available digitally: http://larsmartinson.com/e-comics/

I recently had the wonderful opportunity to correspond with Lars for an EXCLUSIVE Tofugu interview! Below are insights into his stories, his art, his process and, most excitingly, the future volumes of Tonoharu!

For those who may not know, who is Lars Martinson?

Image from Lars Martinson / Media

I’m an American cartoonist that has spent half of my adult life in Japan. For the past decade I’ve been working on a graphic novel series entitled Tonoharu.

What is Tonoharu about?

Tonoharu tells the story of a young American who moves to rural Japan to work as an assistant English teacher. It is based (in part) on my own experience doing the same from 2003 to 2006.

Because Tonoharu is fictionalized and not a direct telling of your Japan experience, what inspired you to tell this story? Did you have an “aha” moment?

I’ve always been frustrated by how hard is it to relate my experiences in Japan to friends and family back home. It’s sort of like when you try to describe a dream to someone. It’s fascinating to you because you experienced it firsthand, but it’s almost always tedious for the listener because they don’t have the same frame of reference. My inspiration to create Tonoharu came from a desire to bridge this gap; to describe the experience of living abroad in a visceral way.

You’ve mentioned elsewhere that your main character, Dan Wells, is not you but merely a fictionalized character. That being said, how do you as his creator feel about him and his decisions? Was he difficult to write?

I’m certainly more driven than Dan. I made much more of an effort to improve my Japanese abilities when I first arrived in Japan, and have a clearer sense of what I want to do with my life. That said, I share a number of qualities with him, so he wasn’t hard to write. Like Dan I’m introverted, and often struggle to form meaningful connections with people around me.

How much Japanese did you know when you went on JET? How did the language barrier affect your experience?

I knew very little Japanese when I first arrived. Just a little bit of hiragana and katakana, and basic grammar. It improved quickly, but even now I feel like I have a long way to go. I heard somewhere that you can become fluent in three European languages in the same amount of time it takes to learn Japanese, and I believe it. It’s a huge undertaking.

One interesting consequence of my mediocre Japanese abilities is I tend to be more forthright when I speak it. It’s easy to be evasive in English since its my native tongue, but in Japanese I don’t have the language skills to dance around the subject. So I’m forced to distill what I want to say down to its naked essence. There’s a Dostoyevsky quote that goes “Stupidity is brief and artless, while intelligence squirms and hides itself. Intelligence is unprincipled, but stupidity is honest and straightforward.” I feel like this applies to how I use English compared to how I use Japanese.

Your main character, Dan, goes through a difficult bout of negative culture shock in the first volume. Did you have a similar experience?

Image from Lars Martinson / Media

Most people who live abroad experience culture shock to some degree, and I’m certainly no exception. I sometimes worry that I favored those negative moments a little too much in the first volume of Tonoharu, because many people who read it seem to assume I had an unequivocally horrible time in Japan, which certainly wasn’t the case at all.

You went back to Japan to study calligraphy for two years after finishing JET. How did that trip affect your art and your relationship with Japan?

Before I really got into it, I had no idea how deep East Asian calligraphy is, both in terms of history and technique. I’m now convinced that it’s the most sophisticated line art tradition in the world, hands down.

When a cartoonist wants to improve their penciling, they usually study Western art fundamentals such as perspective, anatomy and composition. I would argue that Eastern art fundamentals are just as useful to learn comic inking. Practicing East Asian calligraphy has improved my inking more than anything else I can point to.

Regarding your calligraphy learning experience, was it more of a disciplined practice that enhanced the skill you already had or was there something inherent in East Asian calligraphy that got added to you? Do you have any stories about the learning experience?

The discipline was certainly a huge part of it. Art classes in the US tend to emphasize personal expression over technique, so student critiques can be vague and coddling. The calligraphy classes I took in Japan were the exact opposite. We would be tasked with replicating a piece of classic calligraphy as accurately as possible. We’d show our attempt to the professor, who would point out where we went wrong, and we’d try again. They were technical exercises rather than creative ones, but they helped me learn how to control the brush in a way I never would have if left to my own devices. These skills, in turn, benefited my creative work.

Beyond technique, East Asian calligraphy has a number of qualities that informed my development as a cartoonist. It’d be too lengthy to get into them here, but if anyone’s interested I wrote a few entries about it on my blog:

http://larsmartinson.com/thoughts-about-lines/

What inspires you as an artist in the realms outside of comics? Music, film, visual art, etc.

I’ve always been fond of stories told through pictures, so most of what inspires me has visual and/or narrative elements. Wong Kar-wai movies, Knut Hamsun novels, and Hokusai’s sketchbook collections spring to mind as sources of inspiration. For music I really like Scandinavian folk; Hedningarna and Triakel are particularly good.

Recently I’ve become intrigued by the narrative potential of video games. I played Persona 4 Golden on the Vita last year, and it’s taken a place among my favorite narrative experiences in any medium. It paints a surprisingly subtle and nuanced portrait of a Japanese school life for a game that features demon-summoning and serial murder.

What is your favorite manga or manga artist? What draws you to that manga/artist?

I read tons of translated manga when I was in high school. Favorites at the time included Masamune Shirow, Johji Manabe, and Rumiko Takahashi. Eventually my interests drifted elsewhere, so I have to admit I’m not too familiar with the current manga scene. My favorite manga these days is hardly cutting edge: “Sazae-san” by Machiko Hasegawa. I explain why I admire it in this comic:

http://media.boingboing.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/sazae_930px_1.jpg

http://media.boingboing.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/sazae_930px_2.jpg

http://media.boingboing.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/sazae_930px_3.jpg

What has been the reaction of Japanese people who have read your graphic novel?

Image from Lars Martinson / Media

More than anything Japanese people tend to be surprised by the format. The Tonoharu books are hardcovers with two-color interior pages, which is all but unheard of in the manga world. Manga is usually first serialized in weekly or monthly b&w anthologies, so creative choices such as page sizes and printing methods are out of artists’ hands. Conversely, anything goes for American indie comics, so there’s a lot more diversity in terms of presentation, use of color, and binding.

Many of our readers have expressed interest in moving to Japan to become mangaka. What advice would you have for them?

I’ve never actually worked in the Japanese comics industry, so I’ll refrain from speculating on that in particular. But in broader terms, I wouldn’t advise pursuing a “career” as an artist unless you can’t imagine being happy doing anything else.

By some measures, Tonoharu has been a massive success; it’s been covered in the Wall Street Journal and Entertainment Weekly, translated into French and Spanish, and has sold out two hardcover printings with a paperback edition coming down the pipeline. But for all that, I’ve never made anything even approaching a living wage off of my work. Granted, I don’t have many books to sell, since I work at a glacial pace (spending more than ten years on three books is pretty ridiculous). But either way, trying to make a living as an artist rarely makes financial sense no matter how productive you are.

That said, I’m certainly not trying to dissuade people from pursuing something they’re passionate about. Obviously I wish I made more money from my comics, but I don’t for a second regret creating them. I guess my advice to someone looking to work in the Japanese comics industry would be the painfully obvious; strive to improve your craft as much as possible, and become proficient in Japanese. And make sure you’re having fun doing it, because there’s a good chance it may not provide as much monetary compensation as you’d like.

Tonoharu Part Two ends with a cliffhanger. What is in store for Dan in the third volume?

With each book, I’ve tried to capture different aspects of the experience of teaching in Japan. Notably absent in the first two books is any sort of meaningful interaction between Dan and his students, so I devote a significant chunk of the third book to that. This makes for some of my favorite scenes in the whole series, so I hope readers enjoy it as well.

What is your opinion of Japanese cake?

Almost always disappointing.

The books were written by Matt Alt and Hiroko Yoda, a husband and wife team who run AltJapan, a localization company that translates books, movies, and video games between Japanese and English. You might also recognize Matt from his contributions to Néojaponisme, including his taste-testing efforts on the Oh! Sake! series.

Their Attack! books are all about demons, ghosts, and monsters in Japan. Given all that, who better to talk to with for Halloween? I chatted with Matt and Hiroko about their new book, difference between ghosts in Japan and the west, haunted real estate, and more.

It’s a little ironic that you two have this reputation for writing books about the supernatural, considering you started out with Hello, Please!, a book about kawaii characters. How did you discover your mutual love of the supernatural?
Matt: It’s even more ironic when you consider my interest in Japan came mainly through robots! The Shogun Warriors, Mazinger Z, Chogokin, the Transformers, Macross, Evangelion . . . you name it. I even helped run a Japanese robot toy site called ToyboxDX for many years. I’ve always loved giant monsters like Godzilla too, though, and there’s some definite cross-over with supernatural monsters there. But I really owe my interest to Hiroko.

Hiroko: I’ve always loved yokai stories and ghost stories. Ever since I was a little girl, I loved them. So Yurei Attack! feels like something I’d always wanted to write.

Hello, Please! is all about anthropomorphic mascot characters. When we were writing it, we wanted to go deeper than just running a bunch of cute pictures for laughs. It’s so easy to pick things from Japan and say “oh isn’t this weird?” But we wanted to ask: “why? Why are there so many mascot characters in Japan?”

Japan isn’t like the West; we have a polytheistic, animistic belief system, not the monotheistic one of the Judeo-Christian tradition. Polytheism and animism fueled the concept of the yokai. Many yokai are anthropomorphic objects, everyday things with faces and arms and legs, just like many mascots are. So there was a natural connection.

The subtitle of your book is “The Japanese Ghost Survival Guide,” but yurei are a little different from ghosts in the way that we understand them in the west. What sets yurei apart?
Matt: The core concept is almost identical: the soul of a dead person who for whatever reason decides to stick around here instead of going to the hereafter. That much is the same. But you’re right in that the stereotypes of what Japanese consider a yurei are very different from what Westerners associate with ghosts.

In the West, the guy-under-a-sheet is for whatever reason the dominant image of a ghost. But in Japan, there’s a more specific array of characteristics: long, unkempt hair; dangling, limp hands; and most importantly, a lack of feet.

Hiroko: My impression, looking from outside the USA, is that ghosts in the West have more physicality to them. They’re “there,” flesh and muscle and bone, like you can almost touch them.

But ghosts are much more ambiguous here in Japan. I don’t feel like they have any “density,” it’s way more subtle than that. Like a wind that passes by and then disappears, leaving only a feeling behind. Japanese ghosts are almost poetic. That’s what attracts me to them. They tend not to be “in your face” like portrayals of Western ghosts. Well, the angry ones are in your face, I guess, but the point isn’t their presence — it’s the fear.

Matt, you mentioned in an interview that some realtors in Japan actually play up the history of wake-ari bukken, or “troubled homes.” How else are people in Japan today embracing yurei?
Matt: Yes, “wake-ari bukken”: real estate listings with problems. Most of the time realtors try to play things like suicides and murders down for obvious reasons, but they are required by law to disclose them. We found one or two places that play it up, openly disclosing that their listings have troubled histories and that you can save money by renting them — if you dare.

Hiroko: There are actually a whole list of problems that realtors are required by law to disclose, and one of them is the presence of an old, sealed-up well on the property. Kind of like The Ring!

I guess my timing for this interview is pretty bad — I’ve seen you two mention in several places that summer is the season for yurei in Japan. Are there any yurei that are active in the fall?
Hiroko: Summer is definitely ghost season in Japan. That’s when Obon, the festival of the dead, when people welcome the souls of their relatives back to visit. But when the lid of the underworld lifts off to let them out, lots of other creepy things slip out too. So they say.

But there’s no rule or anything. Just because summer is yurei season doesn’t mean they aren’t around at all during the other months. For instance, the Futon of Tottori is an old legend about a bed haunted by two children who died in the cold of winter, and that’s when they appear.

I really love the illustrations in Yurei Attack!, especially the giant, gory collage of hell. They’re all done by Shinkichi, a doujin artist. How did you end up working with Shinkichi?
Hiroko: Shinkichi is an old friend of ours. We met at an art exhibition dedicated to a yokai called the kappa. A bunch of our friends always contributed pieces of kappa-related art to the show and we were invited to join too. So that’s how we became friends.

Matt: She’s also a very active dojinshi artist and so I would visit her table at Comic Market and other places. She asked us to contribute to one of her comic compilations, and so there was this history of collaborating together. We have a lot of manga artist and anime industry people in our circle of friends, so these collaborations tend to happen pretty organically. Yokai Attack’s Morino-san and Ninja Attack’s Kondo-san were friends of ours long before we worked together.

This is probably an impossible question for you two to answer, but what yurei story is your favorite?
Hiroko: The one I have the most respect for is the tale of Oiwa, from the Horror of Yotsuya. The story is centuries old, but she’s just as well known and feared today as she was when she died. Both seriously, and as an inspiration for entertainment like horror movies (she’s a direct inspiration for Sadako, for example.) That is really amazing. You have to respect that kind of longevity.

Matt: Definitely — supernatural “mindshare!” For similar reasons I am fascinated by Masakado, the ghost of one of Japan’s first samurai. His head is buried in a little plot in the middle of downtown Tokyo that remains a shrine to this very day. Nobody will disturb it, even though it represents some of the most expensive real estate in the country, maybe even in the world. Nobody will disturb it because they fear and respect the curse of Masakado — and that’s really saying something in a country as advanced and scientifically oriented as Japan. So in a very real way, ancient ghosts do affect the way people go about their lives in the modern day too.

Are you working on any new books right now? What can we expect out of AltJapan in the future?
Matt: Actually, the books are sort of a hobby for us. We make our living in localization: producing the English versions of Japanese video games and manga. That’s our main gig. We translate, handle recording of voice actors, things like that. So you can expect to see a lot more translated games, comics, television shows, and things like that from us.

Hiroko: Over the last few years we’ve branched out into doing European languages as well. We’re working on several great titles for the PlayStation 3 right now that we can’t announce just yet but are really looking forward to being able to talk about in the next few months.

Is this the end of the Attack! series, or can we expect more supernatural beings attacking us?
Matt: Well I can tell you that we are prepping ebook versions of all three titles in the series, which is what we’re focusing on right now. They should be available in a few months.

Hiroko: We’d love to do more books in the series! We don’t have anything we can announce just yet, but we’re always looking for a new excuse to tangle with yokai, yurei, and other things!

You can find more from Hiroko and Matt on AltJapan.

But what a lot of people don’t know is that more often than not, these free dictionaries are labors of love. Very dedicated people build and maintain these dictionaries in their spare time, sacrificing a lot of time (and usually money) to keep them up and running.

I wanted to hear more about what it’s like to build and run one of these dictionaries, so I took some time to talk to Gregory Bober, the creator of one of my favorite Japanese dictionaries, Tangorin. We talked about Tangorin’s latest update, how Tangorin came about, where it’s going, and what’s wrong with Japanese dictionaries today.

Tell us a little about yourself — what’s your name, where are you from, etc..
My name is Grzegorz (Gregory) Bober. I’m 26 and I’m from Poland. I’m a web developer working mostly on personal projects.

How did you get interested in learning Japanese in the first place?
I’ve always been a huge film buff. In my early teens I got interested in anime. I discovered a whole different film universe and wanted to watch and understand everything in it.

I had a chance to learn English very early on so I got to enjoy movies on a whole new level. I never liked Polish cinema, there’s really not much to like, and once you get a taste of a really good American film, understand it without subtitles, and with cultural references, there’s no going back.

With anime, I was stuck with subtitles, and that bothered me a lot since I knew very well how much I was missing out. That’s why I started learning Japanese. Simply to watch anime without subtitles.

Did you teach yourself Japanese, or did you learn in a class?
Luckily there was a small foreign language school in my home town that offered a course in Japanese language, culture, and calligraphy. I went there during high school. Then I got accepted to the Japanology department at the University of Warsaw. It was a very intense course in everything related to Japan, with a strong focus on language. Knowing kana, basic kanji, basics of grammar and having watched a lot of anime helped me tremendously.

I was a pretty good student at first, but since I’m very lazy and get bored easily I got progressively bad. The fact that we started to spend too much time on classical Japanese and Buddhism didn’t help either. Learning Buddhist mantras by heart and deciphering Heian-jidai love letters from princes to every women in the imperial court while still not being able to have a proper conversation, seemed pointless, I lost interest and decided to drop out.

I never saw myself as a translator or a language teacher so there was no point in staying. I wrote my thesis about the influences of Western culture in the works of Shinichiro Watanabe (Cowboy Bebop and Samurai Champloo), my professor liked it, but I never got my degree.

After so many years of studying, my Japanese still isn’t that great, but don’t worry, I don’t actually translate anything at Tangorin.

Have you ever traveled to or lived in Japan?
After I dropped out of university I spent a little over a year traveling, mostly in East and Southeast Asia. I stayed in Tokyo for six months. I lived in a long-term guest house in Nishi-Funabashi.

I’m not a huge fan of sightseeing, I prefer to stay in one place, live as local as possible and wait until I get to know my surroundings really well so that’s exactly what I did. I got out of Tokyo only once, to climb Mt. Fuji. Most of the time I spent with friends in Shibuya, Akihabara, Shinjuku, Harajuku, and Roppongi (in that order).

My Japanese was good enough to live there comfortably without any English. I had to leave because my two visas had run out and it’s not that easy to stay in Japan as a freelance developer without a degree. I definitely want to go back.

What is Tangorin? What does the name “Tangorin” mean?
Tangorin is essentially an online interface to various open projects built for Japanese language students. My job is to normalize data from several dictionary files, mostly from Jim Breen’s WWWJDIC, combine them into a single fast and easy-to-search database, and provide some basic additional features like custom vocabulary lists.

As for the name, I wanted something short and simple that sounded Japanese but was easy to pronounce and spell in Western languages. 単語 (tango) means “words,” 林 (rin) is a common suffix for dictionaries. I liked how it kind of sounded like tangerine. And that it was a very unpopular word on Google.

What new features are you adding to Tangorin?
The biggest change in the newest update will be a whole new interface based on Twitter Bootstrap. The main layout won’t change much but it will be more consistent and mobile friendly. Much faster too, performance- and bandwidth-wise. The most important thing is that it will help me make more updates on a more regular basis.

The wildcards functionality will be back (it was a terrible mistake to sacrifice them for database performance, sorry for that), few new features in Vocabulary, and improved search results sorting. Shortly after the update I will add a look-up method based on the Wikipedia API. It will translate article names into selected languages.

When did you decide to make Tangorin?
While studying at the university I realized there was no good online Japanese dictionary. There was of course WWWJDIC, Hideki (no longer exists), jisho.org, and few others, but apart from WWWJDIC they were all based on EDICT (and still are).

EDICT is basically a legacy database format for the newer much better structured JMdict. The main difference between these two formats is that a single entry in JMdict contains all the synonyms, alternative kanji writings and readings associated with the Japanese term it describes, whereas in EDICT they are divided into multiple reading-writing pairs with copied English definition.

I was also disappointed with the overall functionality of available dictionaries, how they weren’t properly linked together and lacked useful features like creating your own vocabulary lists. I made a simple interface for JMdict for personal use and then made it public under tangorin.com. Soon, most of my friends from Japanology started using it and they’ve been very helpful with its development.

What are your long-term goals for Tangorin?
First of all, to make it profitable. Right now running Tangorin costs me a lot of time and money. I really enjoy working on it and want to spend more time developing it. There’s a lot of room for improvement. Donations have been scarce but I don’t want to clutter the layout with more ads or limit Tangorin’s free functionality to offer features for a fee. I still need to figure this out. There’s a strong demand for a mobile app, especially on Android, so that’s definitely on my to do list.

Apart from that: autosuggest, incorporating Japanese WordNet to build a synonyms dictionary, hand-writing recognition, a simple morphological analyzer built with MeCab, kanji decomposition, a built-in spaced repetition system to effectively study words from Tangorin vocabulary lists, better forums, REST API, pronunciation, audio files.

I also plan on releasing a normalized, JSON version of all the WWWJDIC, Tatoeba, and KanjiVG data that Tangorin is based on.

How do you try to make Tangorin stand out?
By focusing on developing a clear, fast and easy to use search experience. By combining different look up methods so that you can search with Japanese, English, kana, romaji, kanji, and/or tags from a single input form.

So many Japanese dictionaries nowadays rely on Jim Breen’s WWWJDIC — do you think this is a good or a bad thing?
Definitely a bad thing. The fact that many dictionaries still use EDICT instead of JMdict makes it even worse. WWWJDIC is a fantastic project and the quality of its translations is pretty good. Any kind of alternative, especially for more experienced students, would be great.

We also need better example sentences.

I would love to license Kenkyusha’s database, both English-Japanese and Japanese-Japanese dictionaries, but I don’t have the resources to do that. Perhaps when Tangorin Android and iOS apps are finished.

Do you have any other projects you’re working on right now?
I have other small projects and ideas to work on but right now I’m focused only on Tangorin. It’s been five years since I started developing it and I feel like a lot more could be done in that time.

Thanks to Gregory Bober for the interview! You can check out Tangorin here.

I know a lot of you out there are interested in going to Japan to teach English. Luckily, they’ll take anyone with a beating heart, dumb apes included. But is it really worth it? I’ve always been against a lot of these programs that send people off to teach English. Don’t get me wrong, some of them are good (though I think a lot of people who apply and take these jobs take them for the wrong reasons), but there are definitely companies you should avoid like the plague.

Nova was one of them… but, Nova went out of business, fired a bunch of English teachers (who had nowhere to go), and really sucked when it came to treating their employees good. Nova was bought out by G-education, and recently I got an e-mail from an employee there, who saw both sides of the fence during the transition. I sent him a few questions, and he answered… so anyone who wants to teach English in Japan can now be a little more informed. Of course, my source has to remain confidential, otherwise he’d be fired so hard, and we don’t want that (well, maybe he secretly wishes for it).

1. So, Nova folded a little while back, what company bought out Nova and took it over?

“G Education”, a company that’s basically part of a corporate conglomerate called “G Communication”, which basically buys bankrupt companies and turns them around. They have quite a few businesses, including a lot of restaurants, a traditional Japanese-style inn, and various stores.

2. How was the transition?

Rough. Firstly, the new company promised us that anyone who wanted their job back could have it. When they say how many of us still wanted to stay and work in Japan, they told us we had a choice: “option a”, which would have us start working immediately, cleaning up the branches and packing up NOVA merchandise and supplies, sending things to the multimedia center (whose teachers were doing the same thing, as well as sorting and organizing the stuff sent to them), and generally doing menial tasks rather than teaching. Which is understandable; the company went bankrupt, there was a lot of stuff to be done, and they were willing to pay us our old wages to do so. Meanwhile, “Option B”, which we were highly encouraged to take in order to help the company, was that we would receive 150,000 yen (roughly equivalent to $1500 USD) in order to survive while we stayed home for about a month, and report to work on January 10th where it was assumed we’d resume our teaching duties.

On December 23rd, rumors started going out that they had sent emails to some instructors who chose Option B, stating that unfortunately they couldn’t actually offer employment, and that they wished us the best of luck etc, reneging on their promise of employment.

I honestly don’t really begrudge them too much on this issue; they had to do what it took to turn the company around, and I don’t think that Option B was originally intended to be a malicious trick. However, I do still begrudge them on the timing. A lot of people got them on the 23rd, and several others got them on the 24th… Merry Christmas, you’re laid off! Yokoso Japan!

Very poor timing, and this was the first sign of what would become a continuous theme remaining even today; this very Japanese company has no idea how to handle/manage foreign employees.

Some union got involved and a lot of employees were able to return to work towards the end of January regardless of their offer being withdrawn… but within a few months they were telling teachers they needed to transfer to various branches or else get laid off. Again, I personally don’t begrudge them this decision; the company was bankrupt and had quite a bit of debt, and they had too many teachers where they didn’t need us and too few where they actually had customer demand. It was a smart choice, business-wise.

However, further creating bad blood, when some of the instructors were looking for new jobs, they were told they wouldn’t be hired and shown an article from a national Japanese newspaper, where the G. Education management were saying that the instructors they let go were of poor quality and generally bad and/or unreliable teachers. This article didn’t mention anything about teachers getting laid off for declining to relocate. So those who had been laid off were now finding it difficult to get a new job, and seemingly for no reason other than maliciousness on the part of the new management.

Meanwhile, the former company was so successful at shedding its teachers, it ended up having very few by the summer of 2008… not enough to meet even the basic demand. Students were angry at the difficulty in booking lessons, teachers were upset and quitting over the general disregard management had for its instructors. They started calling up former NOVA teachers who had declined to relocate and offering them their jobs back.

3. Why do you say you “Look back fondly to the days of NOVA?”

Old NOVA, while a typically evil corporation out to squeeze every bit of profit it could from its customers and its employees, was at least reasonably efficient and under control. When management told us something, we generally could feel it was reliable (up until the spiral into bankruptcy, anyways). It knew how to manage foreign employees and had a system set up that took care of all the little details that foreign instructors would have to deal with, moving to a foreign country. The new NOVA is lacking in reliability, know-how, awareness of the differences between foreign and Japanese management style / work expectations.

4. You mentioned they were doing some illegal activity. What kinds of things are you talking about?

For starters, the new contracts that they started offering to people whose old NOVA contract had expired included a stipulation that they not be late to work or miss a day without notice. In other words, if you wake up sick, tough luck: come to work. If you didn’t, you’d lose almost a quarter of your paycheck in penalty, which is illegal according to Japan’s Labour Standards Bureau. There are limits on the percentage of your paycheck that can be reduced as a penalty of any type. Nonetheless, the Labour Standards Bureau in Japan notoriously lacks teeth, especially when it doesn’t really care about the issue. However sympathetic the staff are to our situation, there’s a definite feeling of “not a Japanese problem” since the only people affected are foreigners.

Additionally, though this is nothing new as the old NOVA did this as well: our contracts state that we have 4 minutes between lessons that is administration time, and 6 minutes break time. However, it almost always takes the full 10 minutes (as well as time before and after work, to plan lessons and finish your notes / put files away) to do your expected duties. If you don’t do your work, you’re in danger of teaching a lesson that a student has had recently and generally get bitched out by the management… yet when asked why we’re forced to do unpaid overtime, we’re told that we just need to work faster or smarter, and that it isn’t their responsibility. This has gotten worse than previously, though, as the new NOVA has switched to a 5-student lesson format. Unpaid overtime that is absolutely without a doubt a requirement of our job. An undisguised breach of contract.

5. Would you recommend anyone coming to Japan to try and get a job at G. Education?

Honestly? At this point, no. Come to Japan and try to get a job, sure. But don’t try with G. Education… too much is up in the air at this point, the company hasn’t really figured out what the hell it’s doing and is still not turning a profit as of yet. We’re all still sort of holding our breath for the second grand finale, though that is by no means for sure what’s going to happen. The bottom line is that the future is uncertain, and the management is clueless. I shudder to imagine the mixups and lack of help someone brand-new to Japan would have, all on behalf of G. Education.

Best bet is to get a contract with one of the other big eikaiwas before setting foot in Japan, unless you’ve got a significant savings and don’t mind tightening your belt and not indulging in the tourist experience until your situation gets a bit stable. You can build a decent schedule that will support a comfortable lifestyle, including partying and touristy stuff, but it takes time and multiple small companies.

6. If you could be CEO of this company, what would you change?

The entire approach to the teachers. They view us as a resource, and don’t even treat us as full employees. They fail to realize we are their *only* product, and that we’re not loyal Japanese wage slaves willing to put up with an incredible amount of bullshit and abuse all in the name of harmony and company spirit. This is a problem inherent in the eikaiwa industry (and somewhat for good reason; many of the employees treat the industry as a revolving door because that’s exactly what it is for many people; a chance to experience Japan for a year). If I were the CEO, I would make an effort to treat the employees well, and try to recruit only the serious employees in it for the long-haul.

7. How much longer do you think this company has to live?

It is a bit too early to say at this point. In my opinion, there will always be enough of an employee-base just from the curious foreigners who want to experience life in Japan for a year or so; they probably won’t fail for lack of “product”. However, it is already painfully obvious that the quality of the lessons / teaching has fallen drastically since before the bankruptcy. Part of it is the hiring of just about anyone as they grew desperate for instructors. However, it is also due to some of the best teachers from before the bankruptcy just not giving a damn about their job anymore.

(I’m not including myself in that group, but I do know several co-workers who took their job very seriously and strove to follow the company teaching style and lesson format while providing the best service they could to the customer… and they no longer have that motivation.)

This interview was conducted with a current employee at G-education, the company that bought out Nova when it went bankrupt. His identity is a secret, like Batman, so watch out.

Q. What is your name and where are you originally from?
My name is Roxanne Modafferi. I was born in Delaware, and grew up in Pennsylvania and Massachusetts.

Q. How did you become a professional fighter?
I started doing Tae Kwon Do (like karate) in middle school, then the more full contact Judo in high school, and then in college, I got into MMA (Mixed Martial Arts) aka “Ultimate fighting.”

Q. What is a professional fighter?
A professional fighter is someone who is a specialist in combat techniques, whether it be striking like boxing, or wrestling/grappling techniques, or a mix of those two. They fight a single opponent in a ring or cage and receive compensation.

Q. What types of martial arts do you train in?
I’ve done TKD, Judo, Brazilian Jiu-jitsu, Muay Thai and Kickboxing, but now focus on MMA, submission grappling.

Q. When and how did you decide to go to Japan?
I want to learn Japanese to use in a career, and I decided that before entering college. After four years at the University of Massachusetts, my Japanese skills were good, but not good enough to do a job like interpreting, so I decided to take an English teaching job in Japan. That way at least I’d be immersed in the culture and language. I could also train at a famous dojo/gym and continue my fighting career along side other professional fighters.

Q. How are the “dojo cultures” different in Japan, compared to your (American?) Dojo.
It depends on the dojo. I think in American dojos and gyms, there are specific trainers who focus on certain things (such as kickboxing, or conditioning or diet) to build their fighters. In Japan, the pro fighters tend to just train together- it’s kind of old fashioned. I wish I had a trainer to pay special attention to me and focus more on my weak points.

Q. How do you think martial arts fits into the Japanese culture?
Fighting and the competitive spirit is a big part of the culture, I think. The samurai warrior remains a respected figure and symbol of honor and order. Nowadays, strong pro fighters are also put on a pedestal. The average person knows about the most famous MMA fighters, like Kazushi Sakuraba, and a it’s one of the top sports to watch, like going to a baseball game. Also, all high schoolers have to do Judo or Kendo sword fighting in high school, so everyone is introduced to some kind of martial arts in their lives.

Q. What has it been like being a gaikokujin living in Japan?
It’s been okay for me since I speak Japanese, but people who can’t have it rougher. I live in Tokyo where people are used to seeing foreigners. However, out in the country, you get stared and discriminated against as an outsider who doesn’t belong. That sucks. But everyone has always been polite to me in Tokyo, and I don’t feel like I really stand out.

Q. Perhaps even more importantly, what is it like being the only gaikokujin at your dojo?
Yes, I am the only gaikokujin in my dojo. Again, since I speak Japanese, I can communicate and people are friendly. Sometimes I feel like I can never completely become “one” of them. But mostly, if you train hard, sweat and bleed with people, they accept you. I’ve made many friends, and I adore my dojo.

Q. Where’s your favorite place to go relax after a long day of training?
After training, it takes me a hell-ish hour and a half of standing up on the train to get home. So I drag myself to bed. If I do have free time during the day or morning, I like to sit in front of my computer and blog, watch anime online, or go shopping. I love grocery stores because they have such weird-looking stuff like fish that you can’t get in the States. Sometimes I go to the markets just to look around and laugh at the weird stuff.

Q. Does your Sensei regale to you stories about Bob Sapp to scare the students into training harder?
Actually, Bob Sapp isn’t that popular anymore. And at my current dojo, we don’t really have a sensei. We have pro fighters who take turns ‘instructing’ the beginner’s class, and then after that, the pros just train together. They’re scary enough.

Q. What’s it like for women to fight in Japan?
It’s really hard for women to find fights in Japan nowadays. Women MMA fights are becoming more popular in the States (Gina Carano in Elite EX, for example), but the Japanese organizations aren’t hosting enough shows. We need the public to be more aware of female fighters and support us!

Q. Any advice for someone who wants to follow in your footsteps as a gaikokujin professional fighter?
Visas are a major obstacle for fighters. Otherwise, they kick you out. You need a working visa to live in Japan, but that means you have to find a full time job. And if you have a full time job, it’s difficult to train full time, or even part time. So you need to have a lot of energy, and train hard. So my advice? Eat your Wheeties and be willing to work.

Feel free to check out her website and Myspace, found below!

www.63fight.com
www.myspace.com/roxyfighter