DMM留学 (DMM Ryugaku)

» see ryugaku.dmm.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

DMM opened its study-abroad desk on 14 February 2017 and chose the date deliberately. It was the fourth birthday of DMM Eikaiwa, the company's online English lessons, and the new service was meant to sell the step up from them. You named the country, and it found a school and booked the place. Doing that cost you nothing: 手数料0円, zero fee, sat in the site's meta description from the first year to the last.

It was a broker rather than a school. At its widest it listed more than 300 schools across twelve countries, having opened with six, and the country it pushed hardest at the start was the Philippines, where a month of English immersion cost a fraction of the same month in Australia or Ireland. Japanese students had been flying to Cebu for cheap English since the late 2000s without anybody's help. DMM turned up to handle the paperwork.

The missing fee was not the whole offer. Booking through DMM also got you DMM Eikaiwa and the vocabulary app iKnow! free, the lessons issued as one ticket for every day you would be away, so four weeks abroad arrived with twenty-eight of them. Stretched to its full year the bundle was worth 71,760 yen by the company's own reckoning. There was a catch inside it that explained how the two halves of the business fit together. If you were already paying for DMM Eikaiwa, the free year did not stack on top of what you had. You suspended the subscription you were paying for in order to take the one you were being given.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what the zero in the fee meant ~

An agent who charges the traveler nothing is being paid by somebody else, and in this trade that somebody is the school. The fee you did not pay was the fee the school paid, which also tells you how the list of 300 schools got assembled.

Running alongside the zero commission was a lowest-price guarantee, and that one repaid a careful read. It worked as a price match. You found a website selling the identical booking cheaper and brought it in, and DMM would consider meeting the number. The conditions ran long. The other quote had to agree on room type and on refund terms, and both prices had to be compared with tax included. Campaign rates and group discounts were excluded, and DMM's own figure counted net of any cashback it was already giving you. Then came the clause at the bottom, which said that regardless of all the conditions above, the company might still decline at its own discretion. A second clause reserved the right to suspend or rewrite the guarantee entirely without telling customers it had done so.

~ twelve flags, one desk ~

The flags on the front page were Australia, Canada, India, Indonesia, Ireland, Malaysia, Malta, New Zealand, the Philippines, South Africa, the United Kingdom and the United States. The place where DMM had its own staff on the ground, running its own support desk, was one of those twelve. The desk was in Cebu. Everywhere else, what you had bought was a reservation and a phone number back in Tokyo.

That list is also where this one sits at a distance from me. It is a map of where Japanese people went to learn English in 2017, and every country on it was picked for the language or for what a month there cost. Nowhere that teaches a language other than English appears anywhere on it. The product only makes sense read outward from a single country, and Turkey had no place on that map in either direction.

~ nine months with nothing to sell ~

The closing notice ran on four dates instead of one. New inquiries stopped on 6 March 2019 at ten in the morning. New applications stopped on 29 March at three in the afternoon, with payment required to have cleared by then. Cashback applications closed on 10 June, the same day the website itself came down. The service ended on 23 December at eleven.

The nine months between the last sale and the last day are the whole of this story, and the reason for them is a single line in the notice: students who had already booked would keep every part of their support 帰国時まで, until the moment they came home. Nobody was refunded and nothing was handed to another agency, because neither was necessary under that promise. DMM kept the service formally alive for precisely as long as it took the last person who had paid to finish a course abroad and board a flight back.

The notice gives no reason anywhere in it. It thanks customers and sets out the schedule. Underneath are a contact address and a link back to DMM Eikaiwa.

~ who was at the address in 2025 ~

ryugaku.dmm.com went on resolving for nearly six years after the service it belonged to had ended. By 17 September 2025 the address was serving a cricket-betting and casino site written for readers in Bangladesh. Today it resolves to nothing at all.

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