Photo by jrkester. Feature photo by kalandrakas.
English teaching in Japan is still a lucrative gig, but the days of easy money and great benefits might be coming to an end.
After teaching English in Japan with the JET Program for two years, I saved enough money to travel in Southeast Asia for over a year and launch my career in travel writing.
I lived rent free, didn’t work very hard and sent home about $1,500 per month. Since I got paid in yen, the dollar to yen exchange rate was important: most of the time it was around 110 yen to the dollar.
This morning, for old times sake, I checked the dollar to yen exchange rate and nearly jumped out of my chair. 90 yen to the dollar!? Damn!
Seems like English teachers in Japan must really be making bank these days….
Or not.
In a discussion forum on the popular Japan ex-pat website Big Daikon, a career English teacher recently posed the question:
Is the EFL Gravy Train Running Out of Steam?
Like most discussion on Big Daikon, the conversation is frank, crude and informative. For example, one poster writes:
It used to be that the unqualified teachers could make a living on a Nova salary, but it’s becoming increasingly harder to do that. Even if the salary isn’t so bad, I don’t think they keep teachers around as long anymore. The genki dipshit teaching circuit is not a stable industry anymore.
Destinations
The Big Daikon consensus – 127 posts and 1 colossal tangent later – seems to be that Japanese schools are a lot more particular these days about hiring qualified applicants for English teaching positions.
This is probably good news for Japanese students and for good English teachers – but bad news for ‘punks on a lark’ who spend their days in the teacher’s lounge posting on websites like Big Daikon.
Community Connection
The challenging job environment in Japan makes it important to do lots of research before applying for a teaching position. How to Get a Job Teaching in Japan lays out the basics and is chock full of quality links.
For general information, Matador’s focus page on Japan has a wealth of entertaining and informative articles about life in the Land of the Rising Sun.
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16 Comments... join the discussion!
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Right on. When I was living in Saigon there were plenty of young Americans making a quick buck teaching ESL. Salaries don’t match Japan, but the cost of living is minute, so it seems to even out.
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Published this one a little while back – v. useful tip, expected it to get more views….
How to Move to Saigon:
http://matadorabroad.com/jobs-work-in-saigon-vietnam-ho-chi-minh-city/
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I loved Saigon and I’ve been on the verge of moving back there for a while, but I have to admit it can be downright unpleasant sometimes. I doubt you’d ever have to contend with a foot and a half of sewer water while driving to work in Kobe or Nagoya.
I think the biggest difference is, well, money – you’ll make enough to live in Saigon (I think I got $14 an hour and rent was $100), but you’re not going to walk away with an inflated bank account the way you would have in Japan in years past. Most people end up teaching in private English schools that pay an hourly wage and ignore you the rest of the time, which affords a lot more freedom but far less security. They don’t pay for rent or any other living expenses, which is great because you don’t have anyone to answer to, but they also don’t offer year-long contracts or any benefits whatsoever.
Vietnam’s still kind of an out of the way destination, but they’re doing their best.
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I tend to agree, Tim. Of course, this is the first time for me applying to English-teaching jobs as an “experienced” teacher, but I believe the trend is moving towards a more professional environment. AEON rejected three guys I knew and thought would make great eikaiwa instructors. Maybe I should have hung onto that job in Kagoshima… nah.
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It amazes me sometimes how over payed I am for my job. In China (or at least in Shenzhen) even if you find a job that isn’t all that great, standard pay for tutors in town averages around $30 an hour.
If you’re willing to work hard, you can save up money in no time to travel on. If you dont care to work all that hard, you can live large on what you’re making from salary as long as you dont travel as much. Its a beautiful system, really.
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We should do another article on teaching in China…big new market!
Here’s an older piece from BNT with solid advice…
http://www.bravenewtraveler.com/2007/04/23/teach-english-china/
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The industry on a whole is having problems. The reason companies usually opt for sub-par teachers is that most of them run illegal exploitation schemes on for the most part unsuspecting employees. For instance, by law all companies in Japan are required to enroll their workers in the mandatory National Health Insurance scheme, but many try to get around this and trick their employees into paying for the insurance on their own by instating 29.5 hour a week work schedules. The ploy is that this supposedly is just under full time and therefore makes workers ineligible for insurance benefits. However, not only are workers still required to “be on duty” for the normal 40 or so hours (you are paid for 29.5, but required to work 40), but even this claim is in fact illegal, as all workers are in reality guaranteed insurance coverage by law regardless of whether they work 0.5 hours under some time limit or not.
This is just one example. Many ALT dispatch companies (which are rapidly replacing the JET program all over the country) also pocket anywhere from half to even 75% of worker’s monthly salaries, a practice that not only many workers are ignorant to, but even the local board of educations that pay the salaries via the dispatch companies usually don’t know about either. Similarly, most of these companies pocket a major percentage of (or sometimes all of) the workers’ vacation salaries, by telling them that they do not receive vacation salaries, or that salaries are reduced during vacation time (even though the local boards of education are still in fact paying the same amount).
Pairing this with the fact that the majority of English teaching positions in Japan are more glorified host entertaining than actual language instruction (not applicable to everyone however), and it becomes more obvious why it’s hard to keep qualified teachers in place within an environment that is often designed to exploit them heavily and then toss them out by the time that they become aware of their rights. This becomes quite literal, as dispatch companies typically fire (euphemistically, “not renew their contracts”) their employees right at the 5 year mark because Japanese law also states that after 5 years of service, workers must be hired on a full-time, permanent basis. They simply dodge the responsibility this would entail by ending the worker’s contract and look for a new worker.
Things are looking up a little bit however, in that because of various legal disputes involving issues such as these, a few prefectures have opted to hire their teachers directly without any dispatcher middle-men, which guarantees workers the legal benefits they are given by Japanese law but often deprived of elsewhere. English instruction in Japan is in a harsh stage right now, but hopefully major reforms will be coming down the road.
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Thanks so much for this detailed, knowledgeable, informative comment.
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Yonatan gives about the most comprehensive and useful comment I’ve seen in a long time – thanks!
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Agreed; I’ll start with his info and do a blog write-up soon. Stay tuned…
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Thanks for the update, Tim. I often think about applying for JET, but may end up going back to Korea or China…or even try Vietnam.
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Stephen, I am about to graduate in May, and am thinking about going to Shenzhen to teach English. I don’t know Cantonese and have never taught English before. What advice do you have? Thanks.
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Matt,
Sorry it took so long for me to get back to you. I saw your reply toward the beginning of my vacation and the email ended up getting buried in my inbox.
Dont be worried about Cantonese living in Shenzhen. Although its in
Guangdong, Shenzhen is a city made up mostly of immigrants from all over China. In the main parts of the city Mandarin is all you need. Its only when you get out to the factory districts or into some of the smaller neighborhoods tucked around the city that Cantonese becomes really prevalent, and even then it seems a lot of people are conversant in both. Traveling around Guangdong province is sometimes a different story, but even then as long as you can read a little you shouldn’t have too many problems.One think I would urge you to consider is what you hope to get out of moving to China. If you’re looking to immerse yourself in old, traditional China then Shenzhen is probably not the best place for you. If you’re looking to make a pretty solid amount of money and use it to fund traveling then SZ is probably ideal.
Thats a pretty basic overview, but if you have any more questions youre welcome to message me at my matador profile: CptStKckr
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I’m sorry to bug you, but I’m looking over this site, and you seem to be a good person to ask. I’ve been looking into going to Japan to teach EFL ever since I taught it in the Peace Corps, but circumstances have kept me in the States for the last few years. I’d like to go as soon as I get out of grad school, but the JET program warns applicants about going if they plan on making payments on student loan debt, which I will have to do. Do you know if that will pose a problem?
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Teaching English in Japan doesn’t pay crap, anymore. Every time I go to an interview, I see five or six other guys in nice suits ready to fall on their faces.
The pay is down from ten years ago, 250k yen per month, to about 170k per month, even though it is illegal to pay a foreign English teacher less than 250k per month because it is “unlivable” according to the Japanese government. Nobody stands up for teachers, including teachers, basically. Don’t come to Japan unless you want to be hurt, hungry, and without a way back.
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