NagoyaHammer.com

If any of you have been keeping up on my story and investigation, you'll no doubt know that I am not giving up after being severely mistreated by both the company and the school. I've spent the past six months investigating and trying to untie the Gordian knot. Everything I thought things were over, I would be hit with something more devious and in depth.

Well today I took the first in a major and painful step. I saw a lawyer with a six page summary including mens rhea and actus rhea outlines as well as a prayer for the court for relief (yes, those are the right words, legalese ) and I included both dokusei and shin in it for Japanese understand (yes, Japanese legalese too). Thankfully he speaks English well enough that he could read the contract. Our consultation was for 40 minutes but it expanded into an hour as this is just such a thorny mess.

The good news, a lot of my grievances can be dealt with.

The bad, 300,000 yen just to start litigation. payout is pretty hefty afterwards too. And since this month I only earned 40,000 yen in total, ummmm.... yeah.

The ugly. Full court litigation would take over a year, so arbitration is the first point. It will involve both the school and the company. If that fails then it goes to the court.

The blindside, there's trouble at my new school. A teacher seems to have made a mountain out of a mole hill and as the brown stuff always goes down, I and the other gaijin teacher are going to get slammed with it. As I am the new teacher, I could fair far worse.

I guess Japan doesn't have any 'no win, no fee' style lawyers, nor legal aid for those in a lower income bracket? What's the Japanese phrase for 'pro bono'?
If your lawyer thinks you have a real case, they should be willing to work something out to suit your circumstances. Winning a case against a company and a (presumably) well off school would be good for the firm too.

Primarch wrote:I guess Japan doesn't have any 'no win, no fee' style lawyers, nor legal aid for those in a lower income bracket? What's the Japanese phrase for 'pro bono'?
If your lawyer thinks you have a real case, they should be willing to work something out to suit your circumstances. Winning a case against a company and a (presumably) well off school would be good for the firm too.

There is a fund set up for people without money. I have to provide some documentation and hope they accept gaijin. And pro bono in Japan seems to be only for retired lawyers who want something to do.

On the one hand, I guess it stops people launching frivolous law suits like back home, but on the other it stops real claims from being filed too.

Japan is a consensus based system. One of the words I learned was dokusei. A legal word that implies contractual consensus. As my prior company used the word pay, which us native speakers would refer to as salary or wage, has a third meaning; monetary reward. So they violated dokusei from the word go by giving me a monetary reward which if they had written out, I would never have signed up for.