Tokyo is currently facing a serious shortage of public school teachers, with the blame being put on the long hours and low pay.
Could another reason for the shortfall be that young teachers keep getting arrested?!
According to an article by Friday, money trouble is pushing some educators into a spiral of addiction and leading them to make risky life choices that land them in trouble with the police.
In February, a male junior high school teacher in his twenties was arrested in Nagoya after making the mistake of asking a female plainclothes police officer if she wanted to go to a host club. He was charged with violating a prefectural ordinance against causing a “public nuisance.”
Released in March without charge, he apparently worked 20 hours a week as a part-time math teacher at public schools and two or three times a week at a host club. “I had a dream of working in a host club,” he told police.
In November 2021, a 28-year-old woman who worked at the infirmary of an elementary school in Tokyo was fired for working at a soapland. She was rumbled after an anonymous tip was sent to the education board that employed her (perhaps a dissatisfied customer or aggrieved coworker?). She was working at the soapland several times a month from around February 2020 because she needed the money.
A female elementary school teacher in her twenties was arrested in November 2020 at Okubo Park — which as we recently reported, is a known site for picking up streetwalkers — after she made the error of soliciting a plainclothes police officer. Prosecutors chose to suspend her indictment in January but she was then arrested on the same charge in February 2021 at the same place. She lost her job the following September.
It was reported that she spent too much on fashion accessories and idol merchandise, so she turned to prostitution two or three times a week to fund her expensive lifestyle.
She started her side job in February 2020 and then stopped for a few months during the height of the Covid pandemic’s first wave that spring. She began doing sex work again in July and allegedly would stand in the park two or three times a week trying to pick up clients.
