JBC Language, Inc

I used to go to this school before it was at 725 River Road in Edgewater — even before it was in the JBC video store at Yaohan, which is now called Mitsuwa. When I first went, it was in some 2^nd floor rooms in the Yaohan strip mall.
The owner of the school, Mariko Sasaki, passed away in 2013 and it appears that her JBC Language franchise has passed away, too.
Back when I first went there, Sasaki-​san had a day job as a Japanese language teacher at a high school or junior high school, and the Japanese language school was her side job and dream. You could really feel her enthusiasm and drive, which spread to the other teachers.
This enthusiasm inspired me to put my all into Japanese study and in about 18 months I had memorized about 1,500 kanji characters and had a fairly large vocabulary.
Sasaki-​san held an essay contest with the prize of a weeklong trip all over Japan with her and two winners, and I was one of the winners.
The three of us spent a week visiting castles, temples, and finally the house where Sasaki-​san grew up in, where we met her entire extended family including her Mom and Dad. It was a great experience! except for being with Sasaki-​san, who shunned me the whole time.
From the moment our plane arrived in Narita, Sasaki-​san stopped speaking with me or standing closer than ten feet from me. This was really creepy! And especially since the other student who went was treated normally. At the end of the week I confronted Sasaki-​san about the shunning, and she assured me that shunning was normal in these circumstances.
The worst thing was that, seemingly, the more earnestly and confidently I spoke Japanese, the more shunned I became. This was the exact opposite of my 18 months of experience with JBC Language. What a drag!
I continued at JBC Language after the trip, but I had noticed the tenor gradually changing from a few months before the trip. Sasaki-​san had quit her day job, and the school was no longer her dream — it was now her day job.
The school was growing fast. Whatever enthusiasm there seemed to be for the Japanese language and individual students in the beginning seemed to now be earmarked for growing and maintaining a business where individual students would naturally become less important over time.
I continued studying super hard after the Japan trip, but I no longer believed that anyone at the school wanted to see the results of my hard work. From time to time, I had to correct Sasaki-​san when she made spelling mistakes in Japanese during class. I left after about six months of that.
That was 1993 or thereabouts. Since then the school moved out of JBC video and into its own offices, and as the years rolled on, it gradually morphed into an English TOEFL prep school, and then into a small franchise of schools — with the Japanese language as almost an afterthought.
After leaving JBC Language I registered for a Japanese class at NYU and met with Dr. Mieko Noro to assess my skill. When she asked me where I’d studied before, I proudly said «JBC Language!» and she replied, «Sasaki-​san is a businesswoman.»
I think Sasaki-​san must have been a pretty awesome businesswoman, to have spoken no English at all until her teens, and then to establish a franchise of English TOEFL prep schools in America.
But in retrospect, maybe she wasn’t also the world’s best Japanese teacher or cultural ambassador.

Mariko Sensei! You are the best!
I used to go to this school a while ago, when they were located at 725 River Road, Edgewater, NJ. The teachers are so great and friendly. But if you are expecting to speak english while learning japanese, forget it. They immerse you into the language and culture as much as possible to give you the best change for you to learn as quickly.
If you are serious about learning a language, try them. I learned alot and it was fun. But you must do your homework in order to get anything out of learning (naturally).