Chinese Farm Trainee Gets 17 Years For Murder

From Japan Today:

The Chiba District Court on Thursday sentenced a Chinese man to 17 years in prison for killing one person and injuring two others in Chiba Prefecture last year, while he was receiving training at a pig farm under a Japanese government-sponsored program.

According to the ruling, Cui Hongyi, 27, fatally stabbed local agricultural association employee Susumu Koshikawa, 62, who had urged Cui to return to China, and stabbed two others including a translator on the farm in Kisarazu on Aug. 18 last year.

Those of you familiar with the infamous Gaijin Crime File magazine, which was sold at convenience stores across Japan back in February, might recall that this crime was dramatized in comic form towards the back of publication. While they certainly portrayed the crime has violent and horrifying, the Chinese trainee’s Japanese bosses were depicted as evil bastards who laughed at how little money they were paying this foreigner who was working a huge amount of overtime shoveling crap:

The Chinese trainee eventually caught on to the fact that he was being paid a ridiculously low wage and asked his boss to raise his pay. His request was refused and essentially told that if he didn’t want to work for peanuts, his lazy ass should go back to China. When the translator told him this, he went into a murderous rage and attacked those present:

Even Debito thought the comic was pretty fair, writing that it shed light on the exploitation going on in the foreign trainee program:

You know these GOJ-sponsored programs must be pretty bad when they even turn off the xenophobes!

For more details on the foreign trainee program, check out Liberal Japan’s informative post ‘Will the permanent government fix the trainee problem?’