Board of education issues apology to children for emotional damage over their teacher having a part-time job.

It’s hard not to have a sinking feeling when you hear about a middle school teacher being reprimanded for inappropriate behavior. Was the educator involved in some sort of sexual impropriety involving a student? Or perhaps it’s a case of physical abuse, with a teacher taking out their frustrations on their pupils by smacking them around following perceived disrespect.

Finding out that the incident that landed the teacher in trouble took place in a convenience store is slightly reassuring, but really only a little. Possibilities such as being caught shoplifting or harassing employees aren’t good looks for an educator either, nor are the myriad forms of alcohol-fueled mayhem that can happen at places that sell booze and are open all night long.

However, none of those scenarios are what transpired earlier this month when a middle school teacher in Okayama Prefecture was spotted in a convenience store doing something inexcusable in the eyes of school administrators: working.

On July 4, someone contacted the Okayama City Board of Education to report that they’d seen a man in his 60s, who’s a teacher at one of the city’s public junior high schools, working at a convenience store in Kurashiki, the next town over. The very next day, the principal of the school the man teaches at made a trip to convenience store and confirmed with his own eyes that the teacher was working there, and confronted him about the matter.

▼ The exact locations of the school and convenience store the man worked at aren’t clear, but it’s close to a 20-minute train ride between Okayama City and Kurashiki’s city centers.

To clarify, the man wasn’t ditching the classes he was supposed to be teaching in order to go work at the store. The person who’d reported him to the board of education had spotted him at the store outside of school hours, and the day on which the principal caught him in the act of convenience store employment was a Saturday, the teacher’s day off. Nor was the type of work he was doing an issue. Being a convenience store clerk is broadly seen as respectable, honest work in Japan, a country where the baseline image of service sector workers is of earnest, courteous individuals.

No, the problem was that the man was doing any sort of work at all besides his regular teaching job at the school.

It’s not unusual for employment contracts in Japan to include rules prohibiting side jobs. These aren’t necessarily non-competition clauses, either, such as pledging to not concurrently work for another organization whose promotion and success would be detrimental to the primary employer. Instead, they’re blanket, across-the-board promises not to earn money doing anything else.

Presumably, the logic is that the employer wants the worker to focus all of their energy on their primary job, viewing a side gig as something that will cut into the focus and recovery time necessary to keep them working in peak condition, or they worry that their customers/users will see things that way and perceive allowing workers to have second jobs as a lack of commitment to providing the optimum quality.

▼ Yes, going to get drunk after work is rarely seen as a problem in Japan, but going to another job often is.

Applied to this case, the school seemingly thinks that a teacher who’s working a second job will do a poor job teaching his classes, or at least wants to prevent parents from having such fears.

After the teacher was caught by the principal, it came to light that he’s been working part-time at a convenience store, outsider of school hours, since November of 2023. In total he’s earned roughly 1.7 million yen (a little under US$12,000), with his most lucrative months being around 130,000 yen. That’s not exactly living-the-high-life kind of money, and when asked why he’d taken on a second job, the teacher said that he’d been doing it to “supplement his earnings, in response to his living circumstances” following his “rehiring.” That might sound like he’d been caught in some sort of workplace violation before, but actually the term is in reference to a common Japanese employment practice where workers are let go by their employers once they hit retirement age, and are then rehired to do essentially the same work but at a reduced salary.

“Regardless of my personal situation, my conduct was damaging to the trust of public educators and professional ethics,” said the teacher in statement of apology, “and I deeply regret my actions.” Meanwhile, the head of the Okayama City Board of Education said “We deeply apologize for the great distress and worry that has been caused to the children, their guardians, and all the residents of the city,” vowing to take measures to ensure such an incident would not happen again and to “make efforts to restore trust in the educational system.”

Now, I’ll readily admit to having been a very cynical teen, and it’d probably be an exaggeration to say that I’ve shed all traces of that attitude after becoming an adult. Still, I’m having a hard time picturing middle schoolers lying awake at night, unable to sleep not because they’re worried about exams, bullies, or whether their crush likes them, but clutching their pillows as they whisper into the moonlight, their voices choking back tears, “I just CAN’T believe my teacher also worked at a convenience store…How could he?”, so apologizing to the children feels like unnecessary grandstanding in what’s really more of a move to appease possibly upset parents, especially when no criticisms have been made, at least publicly, as to the actual quality of the lessons the teacher was teaching.

Nevertheless, the man has indicated that he plans to resign from his teaching position over the incident. He’s also stopped working at the convenience store as part of the fallout, so he’s about to go from two sources of income to none, and since he apparently doesn’t have a large enough nest egg to just retire, it would seem he’ll need to look for a new job, but at least he’s established his credentials as someone who’s a hard worker.

Source: TBS News Dig via Itai News, FNN Prime Online
Top image: Paskutaso
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