Well, I've been watching this thread and others on the topic of Smiths School of English Japan for over a year.
I live in Kansai, and have my own school where I teach English to kids.
Prior to that, I looked and enquired to the franchise school systems that exist in the area. Namely Smiths, Modern, and out of curiosity Shanes and Chocolate English. I wanted to check if there was any worth (of course in my opinion only) in buying from an established school franchise system.
Smiths was obviously the biggest and best set-up. I was taken by Mark to a number of schools to have a look at the system.
Modern was a little smaller, but based on the same system, including pricing.
Shanes isn't as simple, and is owned by Saxon-Court which is a large, international company.
Chocolate English is a 10,000yen 'franchise system' owned by David Norton and has a Cafe Franchising system.
The good, bad and ugly of all these companies is written on the blogs by various people. It's advisable to read to filter your information before you buy anything.
The incident with Smiths was very interesting. After 15,000USD initially advertised as his 'offering price' he dropped it to 5,000USD within 1hour of negotiation.
After I compared that, with the fact that there is 100's of pages written by ex-customers on the internet after only 10yrs of business it started to smell ever stranger.
Then he told me about his 'lay away' plan to put down payments of 10% and then pay the rest off with a 2 year contract.
Did he really do what other claim about him on this thread? Bearcat obviously has a lot of info on him.