English instruction is big business in Japan, and Nova, the company where Lindsay Hawker worked, is to foreign language study what McDonald’s is to eating out: inexpensive, ubiquitous and controversial.

Students pay 30,000 yen (£130) to join and about 4,000 yen an hour for a group lesson. Teachers may have only an undergraduate degree as their qualification. Nova teachers in Tokyo are paid 239,000 yen (£1,000) a month for a five-day week and given semi-furnished accommodation for a percentage of that. “Fraternising” with students and outside teaching work are banned. There were reports that Tatsuya Ichihashi was a student at Nova, and Ms Hawker may have taken him on as a private student, which pays much better.

Blogs and bulletin boards for foreigners in Japan are filled with complaints by disaffected Nova teachers. One, an American called Rebecca, suggests that it uses attractive young teachers as a bait for students. “For the trial lesson, almost always a female teacher is assigned to a male class, and a male to a female class,” she writes. “The female teachers work later, because male students come later in the evening. It is an irregular kind of blind date.”

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