"I feel offended that anyone would tell me who I can or can't hang out with," says Brendan (not his real name), one of 6,000 foreign language instructors employed by Nova Corp. in Japan.
According to the language school chain's instructor contract, foreign employees are forbidden to "participate in any interaction with the clients of the employer outside the place of employment." In theory, insist Nova instructors, they are under threat of the sack for so much as a chance encounter with any of the company's 450,000 students.
"Instructors can be harassed and disciplined for socializing with people they don't even know are Nova students," says Robert Bisom, one of two plaintiffs who took a case against Nova to the Osaka Bar Association last year.