Kirk with news about Kumamoto’s teacher shortage. The images are from a video of an RKK news broadcast and the webpage that presents that video. According to the RKK report, Kumamoto’s teacher shortage is more severe than that of any other prefecture. The total number of unfilled slots was 97 as of May of this year. Even that is an improvement over the last year’s 128 but, in comparison to other prefectures, the situation in Kumamoto is currently the worst.
A proposed solution to the problem is to recruit “paper teachers” – people who are technically qualified to teach (have the license, etc.) but are not actually teaching now. (The expression is a variation on “paper driver” – a Japanese coinage meaning “person with a license who doesn’t actually drive.”) Unfortunately for non-Japanese readers of this page, I suspect that Japanese citizenship is required, but I’m not sure. [Postscript: Not required. See comments below.]
The news about teachers in Kumamoto has been awful lately. A teacher whose verbal and physical abuse led to the suicide of one student and diagnoses of PTSD in others continued to teach at the elementary school level long after his bad behavior had become known. He was only recently fired. I don’t know if the teach shortage has anything to do with the reticence to fire bad teachers but it’s one possibility. There have been other reports about teacher malfeasance. https://newsdig.tbs.co.jp/articles/rkk/223112?display=1