American Club (アメリカンクラブ株式会社) is a company based in the Hiramatsuhonchō (平松本町) district of Utsunomiya, Tochigi, Japan which has been involved in the "eikaiwa" (English conversation) business.
[1] The American Club began operating on July 15, 1986,[1][2] and recruited students for English classes during the Japanese asset price bubble economy of the late 1980s and early 1990s.
[3] [4] A group of employees, led by Don MacLaren, subsequently organized, formed a branch union through Japan's National Union of General Workers and took the company's president, Hiroaki (aka "Morio") Sugimoto, and director, Isao (aka "Yasuaki") Konno, to court.
[2][3] [4] [5] These employees received three months in back wages on December 26, 1994, with a stipulation insisted on by Sugimoto that "teachers will refrain from damaging the company's reputation".
[2] During the course of the second lawsuit, in January 1996, articles were run in the local edition of Japanese language newspapers: The Asahi Shimbun[2] and the Shimotsuke Shinbun.
[21][22][23][24][25][26][27] MacLaren also provided The Japan Times with a list of organizations he had contacted in order to help resolve the pay problems, which the newspaper subsequently published on numerous occasions.
[1] The business registration indicates that the Shimotsuke Shinbun, a newspaper that ran stories on the lawsuits,[19][20] advertises American Club's services in its pages.