Recently, news related to Vietnamese people working or traveling in other countries, continuously breaking the local law and stealing, has caused the international community to have a bad view of Vietnamese people.
In the past, former National Assembly member Luu Binh Nhuong bitterly exclaimed that this was “a national disgrace.”
Most recently, on October 5, Nikkei Asia published a report “Vietnamese tourists bring stolen goods home to sell for profit at high prices.” The article said that Uniqlo – a popular fashion brand in Vietnam, has made their stores in Japan a prime target for organized theft.
In Osaka, 3 Vietnamese women were arrested in February 2024, on suspicion of multiple thefts at Uniqlo stores. The trio entered Japan on short-term visas from June 2023 to February 2024. They are accused of taking a total of about 3,300 items, worth about 12.3 million yen (about $82,800), from 37 stores in the Kansai region around Osaka, as well as in Tokyo.
In March, four Vietnamese men and one woman were charged with shoplifting at a Uniqlo store in Fukuoka Prefecture, on Japan’s southernmost main island of Kyushu, and were given suspended sentences. They told police they received 170,000 to 210,000 yen each for a stay of about two weeks in Japan.
Local police allege that the men repeated the thefts. They then passed the goods on to another person, who transported them to Vietnam for sale. These women were trained, and their activities were very sophisticated. Plane tickets and accommodation were arranged in advance, and they were instructed on how to steal less bulky clothes.
According to Asahi Shimbun, the police have issued an arrest warrant for a woman in her 40s, currently living in Vietnam, because they believe she is the leader of the group of 4 suspects mentioned above. According to the description, the stolen goods were “so much that they filled their suitcases every day.”
A question arises, why do a large number of Vietnamese people, when going abroad to work temporarily, or traveling, always find ways to stay and commit theft? Even some people who come to Japan as international students, or as exchange partners between the two countries, are the same?
The reason for the increasing number of Vietnamese people in Japan stealing is because “the debt situation due to having to pay brokerage fees, from brokerage companies is the main cause.”
A Japanese-Vietnamese man who has settled here for more than 30 years told Thoibao reporters that because he has good Japanese skills, he is often invited by local police to be an interpreter during interrogations of Vietnamese criminals. He said:
“I am the one who directly answers the phone and once learned that a suspect’s family had to borrow and mortgage VND200 million ($80,000) from the bank to pay for his study abroad in Japan. Relatives in Vietnam said that in order to repay the VND160 million loan to the bank, their relatives were forced to steal to have money to pay off the debt.”
Public opinion has seen that for many years now, Vietnamese people have had to compete with each other to get a place to work abroad, which is essentially working as slave labor for foreign countries. But why do they still have to pay for the state’s “brokerage” service, and then have to steal to pay off the debt?
Meanwhile, they are the people contributing to the amount of tens of billions of USD in remittances flowing into Vietnam every year. Therefore, please do not blame Vietnamese workers abroad, because of poverty, they have to steal to pay off debts.
If anything, blame the government, why do they let the majority of Vietnamese workers have to find ways to “leave the country” and work for foreigners. Why are the salaries of domestic workers not enough to live on, unable to take care of their families?
Tra My – Thoibao.de
