The Myth of the ¥250,000 Wage.

Japan is an expensive country, everyone knows that, but regardless of this knowledge thousands of foreigners continue to flock here seeking the high wages promised by a job that seemingly requires just one skill; the ability to speak English. After a month spent in Japan as one of these ‘high wage hunters’ I have come to realise that the wages promised are not quite as high as I had previously imagined. As increasing numbers arrive, finding a job that offers anything near to the much discussed ‘average wage’ of 250,000 Yen per month (P.M) is becoming more and more difficult.

Having trodden the familiar path of internet based research before coming to Japan I was left pretty confused over exactly what to expect in terms of a remuneration package should I land a job. The forums I visited for example, were filled with discussions on the difficulties of surviving on a newly employed teachers wage, but what exactly was this wage? Throughout the pages of these forums, along with the websites of the numerous dispatch companies offering work in Japan, a familiar figure kept popping up as the ‘average wage’ for new teachers in Japan; 250,000 Yen P.M.  As a naïve outsider I failed to see how being paid this kind of money could lead to the financial hardships I was reading about, indeed at the current www.xe.com exchange rate 250,000 Yen equates to £1,942.86 or $3,075.04, that’s £23,314.04/$36,900.48 per year, hardly a poverty inducing wage wherever your living.

So where exactly has the 250,000 Yen figure come from? After five weeks of job searching in Osaka I have found plenty of companies that offer much less than this, but just one that offers more to their new teachers (and this was with the catch that all applicants must have a teaching related degree). If life is hard for those being paid 250,000 Yen P.M it must be a whole lot harder for those being paid less – a number which by my estimates accounts for a significant proportion of new teachers.

Thanks to a fairly long, and thankfully productive job search, I have had a good opportunity to gain an understanding of the different types of schools that exist and the type of contracts and remuneration packages currently being offered. From the big corporation eikaiwa’s to the small independent international schools, what has struck me most has been the uncertainty attached to teaching jobs in Japan. The 12 month, secure contracts, with guaranteed hours and wages that I had let myself believe were the norm are in fact near enough non-existent, instead there are a number of companies offering flexible, short term contracts with no guarantees of either hours,  nor wages.

The package offered by Jibun Mirai (part of the new NOVA brand) provides a good example of this type of contract. They offer 6 and 12 month (part time/full time) contracts that range from 12 lessons a week to 40 lessons per week. But there is a catch; while the contract may state you should expect to work, for example, 40 lessons a week, the employer has no obligation to guarantee that number of lessons week by week. One week you might get 40 lessons, the next you could have fourteen. Your subsequent monthly wage is based entirely on lessons worked, not on how many you are contracted to work, if the school only has enough students to teach 80 lessons a month you only get paid for those 80 lessons. Based on the per lesson rates being paid today this can represent a serious problem for teachers.

The pay structure at Jibun Mirai leaves it all but impossible for teachers to take home anything like 250,000 Yen P.M even if you do teach 40 lessons per week. Rather than having a set per lesson wage, teachers are paid a ‘performance related’ wage that starts with a base rate of 800 Yen per hour. With the added ‘assignment allowance’ and ‘regularity allowance’ the figure rises to an almost guaranteed 1,150 Yen per hour, hardly the type of money us ‘high wage hunters’ were expecting. To get up to anything like a decent wage teachers must average between 3 and 5 students per lesson, and there are no guarantees of achieving anything like this figure, especially during the quiet months.

I personally have no experience of working on one of these contracts and I am not in a position to claim that all schools will continually offer fewer lessons than a contract suggests. The thing that worries me is the near complete uncertainty facing those individuals starting a new career in Japan, often thousands of miles away from home. In many cases this uncertainty is compounded by a lack of any sort of employment benefits. Although several schools do still provide national holidays off for their staff (Berlitz and Epion for example), many more insist on staff working them. If you take into consideration that it is rare for foreign staff to earn any holiday in their first six months of service, the reality of the current situation is that prospective teachers are increasingly expected to enter into a contract that has no guarantees of regular lessons or wages, and then work for a minimum of 26 consecutive weeks without holiday.

From what I have seen in my job search the type of contract being offered by Jibun Mirai is thankfully not yet the norm. That being said though, there is evidence of a very real shift towards this type of model. This year for example Epion has stopped offering full time contracts to new staff for the first time with new teachers expected to earn a living wage through extra lessons paid at a per-lesson rate, again with no guarantees. The situation for new teachers is undoubtedly changing, the glory days of teaching English in Japan are over. For those prospective teachers who look hard enough there are, however, still very good first contracts to be earnt. This wont last for long though, beware the contract with no guarantees, it will doubtless be a lot more common this time next year.