ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to understand what the job of the eikaiwa language teacher involves. Here, there is a particular focus on the everyday details of teachers’ working lives within commercial eikaiwa – chiefly the work, the pay, and the terms of employment. The chapter goes on to give an account of how eikaiwa as an industry has related to global political economic changes over time, and discusses the precarity, and forms of Taylorised de-skilled production prevalent in much of the industry. Following this, the chapter goes on to detail the particular context which the later chapters home in on, namely three of the large corporate chain providers of eikaiwa English language education in Japan.
