Middle school teacher moonlighting as host bar host arrested in Nagoya

Woman he illegally invited to come to his bar wasn’t who she initially seemed to be either.

“Wanna go to a host bar?”

That was the question a host in his 20s asked a woman as she was walking down the street in an entertainment district of Nagoya. Unbeknownst to him, the woman was actually a plainclothes police officer out on patrol, but it turns out the man had an initially unapparent identity as well – he’s a middle school teacher.

The incident took place on the night of February 11 in the city’s Sakae Ward. During a subsequent investigation, it came to light that in addition to working as a host and barker for the host bar, the man is also a part-time math teacher at a public junior high school in Nagoya, where he teaches about 20 hours a week. According to investigators, the man lives with his parents and has been working as a host two or three times a week since late last summer, not so much out of financial necessity but because of an attraction to the line of work.

In Nagoya, full-time teachers at public schools are classified as civil servants and must disclose and receive approval for any secondary employment or side business ventures. However, civil servant-status does not extend to part-time teachers, and so the man was exempt from this requirement. The situation gets somewhat muddier, though, with a vaguely defined stipulation that the secondary jobs of part-time teachers not undermine the credibility of their teaching position or otherwise prevent them from sufficient and proper devotion to their responsibilities as an educator. “He hadn’t caused any problems at the school,” commented one member of the Nagoya Board of Education, though. “I heard he’d been working diligently.”

However, the incident is still likely to be the end of the man’s teaching position with his current school. While host bars themselves aren’t illegal, Aichi Prefecture (of which Nagoya is a part) has an ordinance against host and hostess club workers approaching passersby on the street in the manner the man did, and he was arrested for the violation. While his night job as a host may have been a gray area in the eyes of the Board of Education, it sees breaking the law and getting arrested as conduct unbecoming a public school teacher, and is moving to dismiss the man from his position.

Until now, the board has purposely avoided enacting blanket rules disallowing certain types of secondary work, in the interest of avoiding unfairly stigmatizing certain groups of workers. “Working as a host is outside of what we’d considered,” said one member following the man’s arrest, though, and the board is considering establishing more explicit rules for the future.

Source: Mainichi Shimbun via Otakomu
Top image: Pakutaso
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